095 - Our Social Dilemma and Smart Phone Addiction

[music] Hey, this is Notem Questions. I am Destin and I am joined by Matt Whitman. Hey. Alright, so last time what we did here on Notem Questions is we played songs for each other towards the end of the episode. And Matt, you said there was one particular song that you wanted to use to introduce this episode to get us into today's topic, which is about social misinformation and a particular documentary that we watch together. Yeah, just social media in general and what it means and the consequences and all of that business. But the last song on the playlist is one by a group called Cheap Cuts. I've never heard of them. This has vocals from Pete Wentz, a Fallout boy. And I just want to play this for you. And then I want to get your really honest, immediate visceral reaction. You ready? Yeah, let's do it. Go. [music] Wake up, check your phone. You're really alone. Still alone. Wake up, we're one in the night. Who are you? But also kind of who am I? Wake up, check your phone. Pete Party for the Park lives. Don't forget to RSVP. Think about how the pole bears were running out of ice. But hey, this photo got a lot of lights. Get down. But don't feel down. This is why we can't have nice things. Like a clean car or a world piece. So let's sleep through your eyes. Super size, you're fine. It's smoked. Yeah. Okay. I see what's gone here. Check your phone. Check your phone. Okay. You're getting the gist. Yeah. I'm getting the gist. It kind of feels like cake, by the way, which is a great band that I love, which is why I really wanted to play it for you in part just because musically I knew you'd dig it the whole cake plus that boy slim kind of feel. Yeah. It feels good. But it's also very sad because it's true. The whole check your phone every like I literally picked up my phone just now. I didn't mean to, but I picked up my phone because you said the word phone and I was checking to see if there was any notifications on it. I think I'm addicted to my phone, man. I don't want to be. This is a thing that I want to break free of. But that really leads us into this documentary that we want to talk about today. It's called The Social Delima. It's on Netflix. And I watched it. You watched it as well, right? I did carefully and soberly. It was heavy, a heavy watch. I'm particularly interested in this because I did a whole series on disinformation and misinformation on social media. I started that about a year ago and I realized that it was a really important moment in history because I think people are about to start understanding that, you know, we're being, I don't know what the word is. You want to say we're being influenced in ways that are bad. We're being recoded. We're being changed as a species by this thing that both you and I participate in readily. And part of what I like about the way the song goes down as you listen to it is that it uses whimsy and cleverness and lightness. And there's this juxtaposition between all this joy and horns and, hey, hands in the air party time. Check your phone. Abiding loneliness and sadness that comes with a life where your phone rocks you to sleep and your phone is the first thing you fumble for when they're still sleep in your eyes in the morning. Like, why? What do we think is going to be on the other end of the thing? But at least here it's got this sweet goofiness that I'll say it again makes it go down a little bit easier. Whereas this documentary we're about to talk about, it's a tough watch. There's no goofing around in it. You know what this kind of reminds me of? Like the feel of the whole thing. You remember one of the first episodes we did on this podcast. We talked about the short story about Ray Bradbury called The Velt. Remember that? Yeah, that's where I just drew that phrase every night they rock us to sleep. Oh, yeah. Okay. That's what you're doing. The deadmouse song that is called The Velt. Remember? Yeah, I do. Every night they rock us to sleep. So in love with the way we are or whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So cool. This is going to be a super interesting topic. Let's do it. Let's learn about the social dilemma. It's directed by a guy named Jeff Erlowski or Lowski. I don't know how to say that. O-R-L-O-W-S-K-I. I feel Erlowski. Or Lowski? Yeah. Okay. Or Lowski. So it's an amazing, I don't know if I would call it a documentary because there's this parallel like storyline that's going with it. It's a really interesting way. It's like a through line, this side plot. I highly recommend it. So I also recommend watching it with your family. Do you recommend that? Yeah. Even if you're the kind of family that really, really cares about the family friendly thing, I think you get shit once and otherwise. I don't think it has swears beyond that. Yeah. And that was from a US Senator. Oh, yeah. You're right. Yeah. In a hearing. Tester from Montana, who seems like a pretty cool dude, by the way. Yeah. Go Montana. I like that part. Yeah. Yeah. I like the way you're describing it because it is a documentary and it very much has that feel. It's beautifully shot. I mean, it's just wonderful execution. But the parallel story is, what would you call it? It's not a dramatization. It's a hypothetical American family and they do a good job of making you empathize with actual humans and actual characters who are interacting with some of the problems the documentary is describing in a way that I'm guessing for most families would look pretty familiar. Can I just top level it real quick? So yeah. So the whole point of the documentary is the premise that social media as we view it today is not what's actually happening. We kind of think social media is the way that we can share things with our friends, you know, share these pictures or this thought or opinion that I have with these other people or, you know, just argue with people. But the premise of the whole documentary is that social media is fundamentally changing the fabric of society in a really big way. And the guardrails are kind of off this whole situation and it's running out of control. And what's so fascinating about how they did this is they got former executives and engineers and things like that from these companies. And the reason I found this so interesting is I tried to do something like this on smarter every day, except I went to the companies. I went into the doors of these companies, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. And I spoke with people that were in charge of fighting or combating misinformation and disinformation. What's so interesting about this documentary is they took a different angle. They got people that had left these companies and asked them what they thought about what was going on on the inside. Now I have no way of knowing if these are people that left under good terms or bad terms. You know, a lot of these people say, well, you know, I have, you know, negative thoughts about what I did while I was there. But we have no idea of knowing if they left on good terms or if they may be leaving on good terms would be a strike against their credibility. Yeah. And on circumstances, maybe leaving on bad terms would be a strike against their credibility. It's moot. And less what they were all saying is factually inaccurate, which it didn't strike me that way. But assuming they're telling the truth, I guess I don't really care why they're not there anymore. That's a good point. That's an excellent point. Yeah. But my point was just trying to compare and contrast with what I did on the misinformation series on smarter every day because my point was external manipulation. And the first reason was people that were trying to manipulate YouTube. This is what I studied. People that were trying to manipulate YouTube for a financial gain. And the other thing is people that are trying to influence others, whether it be about politics or about, you know, hating your brother or your sister online, all that sort of stuff, but external factors like state-sponsored manipulation of social media, that sort of thing. So I found this to be very different than that. They kind of waited over about the 2/3 market, waited over into the kind of stuff that I studied earlier, but I just found it to be fascinating and very, very well done. Yeah. What were the primary emotions you felt as you watched it? I felt like a person on a sinking ship that knew there were holes in the ship. And I have a bucket. And I'm starting to try and bail water out of the sinking ship. And everybody else has a bucket, but nobody wants to help me because they're too busy like looking at the fish or something. And my job liver over here, I mean, come on, it's like somebody else with a bucket. You just asked me what I feel like, and that's, this is what I feel like. And so, okay. Well, then you can't be wrong. Well, I'm gonna put the heck, you asked me a question. You asked for my emotions and I'm giving you my emotions. Ripping you, you're good. You're good. I gotta be careful getting you into emotions. It's weird. Yeah. And I feel like everybody in this documentary felt like that as well. They're like, hey, this is happening. It's kind of like chicken little, like, hey, the sky is falling. Only the sky is actually falling. Yeah. I see it to be true. I mean, very, very intelligent people that I know, like hyper intelligent people that I leave my children with. They've said, hey, you know, have you heard about all this Bill Gates stuff with the vaccines? And well, yeah, what's the, is he working on so stuff? No, he's trying to blah, blah, blah. And it's clearly misinformation. Like 100% clearly misinformation ideas that wouldn't even make sense for anyone wouldn't have any upside or benefit to Bill Gates or anybody. Yeah, I know the kind of rumors you're talking about. And then I kind of look at a person, I'm like, well, wait, wait, what? Are you? What? And I've tried to do several different tactics. The first is like, where did you hear that information? Full disclosure here, I work with the pointer institute on something called media wise. I am a quote ambassador for this media wise program. And so part of that is I try to help educate the youth of today and other people about misinformation online. You know, think before you click. Did the person that put this in front of you have any reason or anything to gain by doing that? You know, is all these types of things, you know, check the source, trying to teach people basically media literacy, which is not taught in schools today, by the way. I have invested interest for my children. I want my children to live in a world where there is truth. And you can figure out what is right and wrong by going to the internet. But right now, the signal to noise ratio on the internet is so bad. If I want to like no truth, instead of going to Google it and try to find it, I was doing this today. I wanted to know where rockets are launched in Russia. And I know Bikonore is one star city. They launched rockets from there. And I know that the orbital inclination of the international space station is 51.6 degrees because they want to avoid the border of China. But I also know there's other places that they launch rockets in Russia. But I have no idea what they are. And I chose to contact a human and ask a human because I trust what they could tell me better than what I could Google. Does that make sense? What's the number one thing you're hearing from people right now as they try to make sense of the COVID-19 equation? What's the number one complaint that you hear from people regardless of where they land on political questions? Nobody knows the truth. Nobody knows what's going on. That's what I hear from everybody. Doesn't matter if I'm talking to my most left of leftist friends or acquaintances or my most committed red state, God and country, conservative friends. Everybody says the same thing. Feels like everybody's lying. I don't know what's real and what's not. And I don't know that anyone knows what's real and what's not. That's really troubling. And I think in the documentary, they used the phrase that something we're past to the information age and now we're into the misinformation age. And I feel like the information age came and went so quickly. I was really enjoying it. I don't like the misinformation age very much. It makes me feel unsteady. And if I don't have an agreed upon set of facts or parameters, it's very difficult to process anything with people who don't happen to already embrace the same parameters I do coming into the conversation. I guess it just wasn't very hard to see where the breakdown is occurring as the story unfolded. Do you know what eternal September is? Have you ever heard the phrase eternal September? Nope. Have you ever heard about use net? Do you know what use net is? Rings a bell, but I don't want to trump at my ignorance. Bring me up to speed. So in the early internet, there was this whole series of bulletin board systems where you could go on and you could communicate with people. And use net, I was an early user of the internet. And I remember some amazing forums online. And everyone in there was a person of goodwill. It was just text-based. You can go find things that I wrote from way, way, way back in the day. It's interesting because the internet was all about learning things from other people back in the day. And then as people gather, more people and more money gathers, then the attraction of that particular town square grows. Once you can make money off a thing, it gets interesting for many different reasons. It's no longer about, oh, just trying to find out how to repair this old waffle maker. You can figure out how to gain power like that. And then the sin that's in every human heart, I believe, comes to bear on these new technologies that you can connect people with. And amazing things happen. And amazing things don't have to be good. You know, eternal September, by the way, is in 1993, September of 1993, that's when the people that made America online, they started offering use net access to everybody on AOL. What would happen is, if you were on one of these forums, as you came in, you would learn the slang and you would learn how that culture of that particular bulletin board or whatever worked. And you would have this lingo and you slowly started to get it. And you're like, oh, cool. But in September of 1993, everybody got dumped on use net at the exact same time. It's the equivalent of, you know, everybody running into a subreddit today. And you know, if a, if a subreddit front pages or something, it gets really bad, really fast. And that's because the people that are coming in are coming in at such a rate that they don't have time to learn the culture. Yeah. We had that happen with a basketball game that we ran forever. It had a great culture, rotation of maybe 15 to 20 people who would show up. You'd have a dozen to 15 on a good night. Everybody knew what was and wasn't cool. What's a foul? What's not? How hard do you go? And then we invited a couple people and they invited a couple people and all of a sudden the circle grew to 30 in a couple of weeks. And they didn't know the culture. And so the culture got reset and the thing that made the game awesome in the first place was destroyed literally in two weeks worth of playing. And it was over. You couldn't get it back. That's a wonderful analogy. That's amazing. What's so interesting about that is in basketball, there are rules. This is unacceptable. That's a foul and we all know it. Or you know, that's ticky-tack. We're not going to call that. Exactly. And so it literally stops the game when people don't behave correctly. Yeah. That was eternal September. And so that's when I still don't understand though, eternal September just refers to the moment where a well dumped everyone onto use net. Yeah, exactly. It's like that was the moment that it all stopped. The influx of users, it just changed everything. Yeah. And so that was it. After that, nobody could get it back. You know what? I'm going to Google and see if I. So I used to hang out in this one forum called alt.fan.cesalatoms. Alt.fan.cesalatoms. So seasonal atoms was this fictitious guy that wrote this column called the straight dope. I used to hang out with in there and I would learn so much stuff. The straight dope used to be a series of books. And alt.fan.cesalatoms, which is a really weird name, but that's where people would go and hang out and try to learn all these really interesting things. Everything changed once it got big. I still remember I went to a surfing the net competition when I was in high school. Okay. I won because it was the year that Google came out. And I found out about Google before everyone else. I used to use a service called altavista. Have you ever heard of that? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. This is ringing about. You've mentioned something about this to me before. Yeah. So altavista was this old search engine. Looks like it's been purchased by Yahoo now. And that used to be the best way to search the internet. After that, everything changed when Google hit the scene. And I still remember sitting in a business class at university around the 1999. No, it was 2000 time frame. And I remember the economics professor, the microeconomics professor saying, Hey, these search engines that you're using for free, at some point you're going to have to start paying money for these because the market just doesn't make sense. And that's because a new market was emerging that the professor didn't understand. And that was the market of people's attention. Yes. Anyway, I'm Ramlin, dude. I'm sorry. Keep going. I have really deep thoughts and feelings about all this. But we got to get this. I knew we were going to have a tough time dissecting this. And that's part of the beauty of the program is what an orderly job they did of breaking down such a wild network of ideas. So I'm not surprised at all that we've shot down multiple different trails a little bit. Let me just try to reset it a little bit. This is how the social dilemma struck me. We watched the social dilemma program. You watched it. I watched it. We talk about this offline all the time, the climate of the internet, social media, phone addiction, how apps work. We talk about this constantly. What we do as parents with phones and social media. We both effectively as much as I don't like to admit it, we both work on the social media. We're in the middleman business, right? We don't design this stuff. I'm addicted. I will say it. I'm addicted to my phone. I just said it. Yeah. That's a problem because you don't want to be addicted to anything, right? I do not. Okay. Here's what I'm doing. I am literally making a list of things we're going to talk about in this because if we don't put some car grills on this, we're just going to go. Okay. So phone addiction is number one. What else you want to talk about? Let me just keep top leveling this year. I think the reason you and I wanted to talk about the social dilemma was not because here was another blunder bust scatter shot. Here's a bunch of opinions about things that we don't like about this little element of the internet or that little element of the internet. The reason that it affected me and I think you is because it was so targeted. It took you on such a clear journey of here's the problem. Why do you think that problem is? And then nobody can answer it in the intro to the show. And then they start exploring how the problem manifests right alongside the question of why the problem is manifesting. And one of the things that is so tricky about the whole question that I thought the social dilemma handled really well is even getting your finger on what question to ask. What is social media? What is going on with all of this? Why is it problematic? How is it affecting people? Is it even problematic? Everybody feels weird. The whole thing feels off. Everyone is rightly suspicious and knows this probably isn't good for us. But this is the first thing I've seen that did a great job of putting those guardrails on you just described and walking me from point eight to point Z. Here's how the problem happened. Here's how it's affecting people. And unfortunately I think that the thinnest part of the documentary is, here's what we do about it. I don't feel like they had really any good constructive proposals at all. So what if we follow their outline and take another run at succinctly articulating what the problem is, or at least repeating the social dilemmas take on what the problem is, and then what if after that we talk about how that happened and after that what if we talk about what that looks like for normal humans like you and me? What do you think about that order of business? So what is the problem? How that happens, you said? Uh-huh. I don't understand what you mean by that, but I've typed it out. And then I'm gonna say how we respond. And then under that I'm gonna put phone addiction and then I'm gonna put Destin's proposal. Okay, I would say what's the problem? How did it happen? I think the next question is how does it manifest? And that's where the phone addiction conversation kicks in. How did, and then we talk constructive proposals. Okay. Cool. How does it manifest? Take a shot at it. The problem is we don't know what truth is and we are indirectly told what to think by what media is put in front of us. Okay. I would say yes, that's an accurate description of what they're saying and reality. I would add to that that the problem is that humans and our attention is commodified by not even humans, by algorithms, by systems that are beyond humans that are specifically built with the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of our OS, our personalities, our humanity in mind to exploit that for attention, to tap into our insecurities, our weaknesses, our distractedness, our anger, our fear, to keep us coming back. It's kinda like the thumbs up or thumbs down, it doesn't really matter on YouTube either way, it's an engagement, you know, that was always the old saying about it. It's kinda the same thing. It doesn't matter how the click happens, just there must be eyeballs, there must be clicks. And if you can exploit joy or warmth, they're happiness to do it fine. If it's easier to accomplish that by exploiting anger, rage, fear, fine, we just need those clicks. And that's how the systems were built. And now you throw 10, 15 years of evolution over the top of that and the systems are very, very good, but according to the show, we haven't evolved in that time. Our brains haven't changed, I'm the same species, I'm the same thing that I was in 1995, but my dance partner, the internet, has evolved a billion times over and to quote one of the people on there, it's not a fair fight. We're not evolved to do the dance properly to recognize what's going on. And so that exploitation is part of the problem as well. Well, at a more simple level, the asymmetry of social media. So for example, if you are a young person and you're trying to find a mate in a town, when you grow up in that town, everybody knows who the hot guy is. Everybody knows who the hot girl is, right? People know the attractive people. And your selection pool for your mate is very small. Now, if you instantly, people poop, you know, type, type, type, and there, we're gonna give everybody a device, and suddenly you have the ability to see every single person in the world who presents themselves as if they're somewhat available. That changes the mental calculus with how you want to select a mate, especially if you're a young person and you're looking to find a person, you know? Sure does. That changes things. Different physical attributes become more interesting. I was four foot 11 when I turned 16. And so I matured later than most people in life. So imagine the pressure I would have felt had I had social media back in the day, "Milly man, you know, I'm not jacked and have, you know, huge abs, and I'm not even shaving yet." You know, that kind of weird stuff. I can't imagine what that's like to grow up. - So everybody when we were kids and people worried that magazines were gonna do that to us, it seems so harmless now. (laughing) Like magazines, really? I think we'll be okay. We can fend that off. - Yeah. - But kids have no chance against what they're seeing. - No, they don't. - You know, so you talk about that pool expanding to the place where anybody can go and see literally the best brightest, hottest from all reaches of planet Earth. And they get to compare themselves to that, which is never gonna work out. But now add on to that, the fact that you're not even seeing how they actually are. Instagram hot is completely fake. Did you see the tweet this week about somebody built a fake luxury private jet in their living room, and we're taking pictures like they were jet setting around as an Instagram star, and then they were letting other people use it to take pictures like, "I'm just jet setting right now." No, you're in somebody's living room. - Really? - Overpriced dump in a bad neighborhood. (laughing) But, I mean, you don't know that if you're 13, you look at that picture and you're like, "Oh, that girl's 16 and she jets that. "She's probably going to Italy. "I can't compete." But then tag onto that filters. I do that so screwed up. It's fun and it's goofy and all of that too, but it's ridiculous. You're comparing yourself to an oddly computer enhanced half animated version of other people. Again, I'll take my chances with a kid in 1992 walking by a 17 magazine that's a little bit airbrushed. That's how they used to do it. And being like, "I'm not as pretty as that girl. "I just don't think a kid has any chance, "self-esteem-wise and appearance-wise against social media." One of the things that really struck me that the Tristan guy said, who I thought was great, I like him, I'm rooting for him. At the end, he said that one of the side effects of social media is that there is no more truth. We don't believe anything is true. It abolishes the idea of truth. Paraphrase is mine. That's crazy to me. Because for the second half of the 20th century, I mean, there were a couple of philosophers, again, a boatry art, it doesn't matter. The whole postmodern thing as a philosophical movement, post-World War, till a few years ago, was about truth. It was about knowledge. Is anything actually true or real? And it was just fascinating for me to listen to Tristan completely concede the idea that, yes, of course. I mean, we did 50 or 60 years of these ridiculous mental exercises about whether anything is actually true or not. Okay, that was a fun thought exercise. But obviously things are true or not true. Maybe some things are more gray. Maybe some things are more obviously true or not true. But reality is a thing. And so maybe one of the good things that comes out of this conversation is that we move past that relativistic thought exercise, which I think was good and got us to a place of realizing, okay, the fundamentalism is screwy. Not everything can be nailed down to an absolute one or zero good, bad, true false. Some stuff is relative, but some stuff is obviously just real and true or false. And maybe this is a thing that brings everybody from all different perspectives and philosophies in life together to say, okay, truth is a thing. We can talk about the limits of truth and knowledge. But I found it encouraging that one of the things that Tristan feels like he needs to push back on is the knowledge that truth is abolished and gone. And there is no such thing anymore. I'm glad to have him as an ally in the idea that at least some things are true or not true. Yeah, so I've mentioned this quote to you in the past. Comparison is the thief of joy. Yeah, great quote. I've tried to figure out who said that. It's been attributed to Teddy Roosevelt. It's been attributed to many different people. They don't really know who said it. However, it rings true. It makes a lot of sense. Like, yeah, I am happy with what I have until I see what other people have. That's beyond what I have. Yeah. Or even if it's different. You know, the grass is always greener kind of thing. I remember being in Honduras on a mountain one time and being up on top of this mountain and seeing these kids play. And they were playing marbles. And they were so dang happy. You know, I spent a week or two up there with those kids. And then I came back and I saw kids that were upset because they couldn't get the latest video game. And I just remember thinking, you just don't get it, man. You don't get it. There's people with nothing and they're happy. Why are you not happy? Because you-- and then it slowly-- I don't know, never have so many had so much and been so unhappy. Well, isn't that the truth? That's probably true, right? We live in the best moment in the history of human existence by every metric other than happiness. Dude, there's like bananas on the counter in there. Yeah, like from the tropics. You know what I mean? Have you ever opened your refrigerator and just looked at it? Been like, holy cow. Somebody got cocoa from South America and put it in pudding that was made from cows. Oh, it's insane, man. And they brought it to my house. It's insane. Yeah. Violent crime has fallen off a cliff since you and I were in high school. Has it? We're more environmentally conscious than we've ever been in the history of ever. It's amazing how much stuff we've got our heads screwed on straight about right now. But the heart is mess. Oh, that's a really good point. That's the thing that stood out to me is right at the beginning when they were defining what the problem is. And that's still where we are in our conversation about it here. when they're defining what the problem is. with social media is off camera, the interviewer is like, well, what is it? And all the different interviews are like, you know, it's not really one person, there's not really a bad guy. I don't think anybody set out to make this mess. It's a perfect storm. And so then the interviewer comes back and it's like, well, then what is the problem? Then why did it happen? And everybody just stares blankly at the camera and then it cuts to the title screen and now you're into the show proper. And I don't know what you were sitting there screaming at the screen, but I'm sitting there going, it's total depravity. It's like, like, look, I understand. I mean, I do a show, it's about the Bible, I talk about theology sometimes. I understand this can be off-putting for people, but there is a Christian doctrine that says that people have problems. And it is one of the Christian doctrines or doctrines from any religion in all of history that I'm most sure of. I think that we don't like this concept 'cause we all picture the street preacher who yells at people or was mean to your gay friend or was a Jack Wagon about some girls closed or called somebody a whore. Everybody knew that ass on your college campus who came and was a complete jerk about their religion. I'm not talking about that guy. I'm not talking about the weird, puritanical, controlling, culty stuff. I'm not talking about any of that. I'm talking about the basic assertion that people are flawed. People have problems. And for a while, it was fashionable to say people were basically good. For a while, it was fashionable to say people are absolutely horribly evil. I think the one thing everybody can agree on is people are definitely imperfect. People definitely have flawed motives. Every human you've ever known is selfish. And that's the answer to how this happened. You make an algorithm that exploits the weak stuff about us, the bad stuff about us, the stuff that makes us do bad things, insecurity, anger, fear, ignorance, et cetera. You stoke all that. There's gonna be a side effect to it. And maybe as soon as the interviewer got done asking that question, they all thought for a minute and then gave that answer. But at least the way the video was cut, they made it look like everybody just sat there and shrugged and I'm going, look, you don't have to think there's a God. But this is a point where 2000 years of Christian theology, it's right, it squares with reality and humanity. People are imperfect. You put all of us in a metaphorical room together, joined together with zero accountability, and with a robot working against us to draw out our worst impulses, it's gonna suck. So why are we surprised? What are we doing with the spaces we have here on the back catalog where there were ads before? Well, I think since we no longer work with a lot of these sponsors and I don't know, the landscape has changed. I think we tell people about Patreon. I think that makes a ton of sense. And I mean, for the most part, all of our interactions with the sponsors have been pleasant enough. I know you do business for a while, it's great. You like what their product is, but just time changes and their campaigns and then we got these spots just sitting here in the back catalog that are no longer relevant and the offers don't stand anymore. But the thing that lasts is the relationship, it's the patrons, it's the patron thing. It makes sense that we would do that. Absolutely, absolutely. And if people would like the sponsor, we would be grateful. Patreon.com/notamquestions, right? I like that language. I haven't heard you use that before, I don't think. If people would like to sponsor, like assume the role of some of the companies we've worked with that sponsor of the program because there's a thing, we never have to go back through the back catalog and replace this conversation you and I are having right now because it will always be relevant. It will, it will. So the fact that patrons support, notam questions is a big, big, big deal because we can just do what we want. And we don't care about what anybody thinks. We can just have awful conversations. So to help enable our narcissism and allow us to do whatever we want, please consider going. (laughing) That's it, thank you so much. Patreon.com/notamquestions. (upbeat music) It's not that the robots working against us to draw out our worst impulses. It's that the robot lets us choose and we choose our worst impulses. There's a difference there. The program made it look like the robot is trying to make us choose our worst impulses. I understand that. It's an over-determined algorithm. So yeah, I touched on this with the Facebook video. So Facebook figured out, and I spoke to, I believe her name is Tessa, at Facebook, she's a VP. She said, look, this is what we figured out. And you know what, I think I can just plug this in and let you hear this. Let me just let you hear exactly what Tessa said, okay? This is me, at Facebook headquarters, interviewing a vice president of the newsfeed. Okay, so Tessa? Yes, Tessa here at Facebook. Okay, so you are over the integrity of the newsfeed at Facebook, which is a big stinkin' deal because that affects a lot of people. Yeah. But your actual people trying to actually solve these problems, right? Absolutely. And we take that responsibility seriously. And we are people and we're people who do this work because at the end of the day, we really care about the mission of this company. And we really care about the over two billion people who trust us to provide them with experiences that are meaningful and authentic and consistent with what they come to Facebook to have. Oftentimes, different companies, and we at Facebook do this, will draw a line and say there's certain type of content that we're not gonna allow on the platform. Photography, for example. Photography, hate speech, graphic violence. Right. But what we see in the data, and this is not true only on social media, it's also true offline, is that as content gets closer and closer to that line, it can actually get more engagement. Right, so if you think of cable news, right? It can be more engaging with things that get closer and closer to provocative, sensational. But we actually have the ability to try to change the shape of that curve so that its content gets closer to that line, it gets less engagement, not more. And that creates a better experience for people and a better environment for the community, while also making it a lot harder for bad actors to try to gain the systems to achieve their own objectives. Okay, so what you have to understand is that when this was said in 2019, last year, Matt, this was the first time to my knowledge that Facebook, well, I mean, at least I was studying this stuff, tried to figure it out. This was the first time they had acknowledged, hey, we are going to bend and shift what people are thinking about. Yes. Because if you were to take 12 year old boys and you were to put a line of swimsuits in front of them, and the first one looks like a swimsuit from the 1800s, and as you move to the right on this number graph of swimsuits, the swimsuits get smaller and smaller and smaller as you move to the right. Where are those 12 year old boys going to look? As far to the right as you can go. Exactly. That's human nature. We know that there's this thing that we shouldn't be interested in or, oh well, that's beyond what's right. It's the whole fruit and the garden kind of thing. What is beyond what I'm allowed to do? That's naturally where I want to go. And the next question is, well, what are the guardrails? Will mom know? And that typically is where we end up, wherever we think we can get away with it. And the problem with our phone or our computer or our feed or whatever is that we feel like, oh, well, I can just swipe and see the stuff myself. Nobody knows what I'm looking at. But they do. And the reason they do is because the companies that run these algorithms studied the data that they get from us to figure out what kinds of things we like. Because the longer they can keep us on a platform, the more money they can make from advertisers. Have you noticed lately that YouTube put a lot more ads on YouTube videos? Have you noticed that? It's been off the charts. It's really diminished to the experience for me. Yeah. Have you noticed when you upload a YouTube video and go in there and you figure out how much you can place exactly where the ads are? Have you looked at what the default is? Oh, the default is front-roll, back-roll, multiple mid-rolls, pop-up card. It's everything. The default is everything. And further, I had to actually go through my back catalog and purge every video over a certain length a while back of mid-roll ads. I don't want that in there. That's not a good user experience. It's not an ever-to-natural break point. Look, I'm not trying to bite the hand that feeds me. I really like being on YouTube. They've been a good partner in a lot of ways. But I did not like that move. It cost me a bunch of time and work. And a whole bunch of people had to sit through a bunch of disruptive ads that killed the flow and connection that I have with people who are watching. So yeah, I've noticed. What I've done is I've done the same thing. When I upload these days, I'm removing ads instead of placing ads. But anyway, back to Tess' point. Tess' point is if they let people choose, they will always go as far to the right in the line as possible. - And your brain immediately, when you hear her say that goes to just porn, nudity, sexy stuff, right? Or violence? - But if I'm hearing her, or violence, but if I'm hearing her correctly, and I'm hearing the social dilemma correctly, and I'm hearing my own heart correctly, it's as close to the line on anything, including truth. the more fantastical, the more interesting. Absolutely. In the effect of that, is that false information or juicy information, spreads like wildfire, it spreads faster. I have an aunt who will pick up the phone and call everybody she knows if she hears something on somebody. That's charming. Yeah, so if you get a call, you're like, oh, okay, I know there's a reason for this call. What is it? We'll figure out what it is in a minute, but right now, I just know that to be fair, that same person calls me on my birthday, which is great. But that I have juicy information and I want to spread it, that gossip factor. What is it about gossip? That's a fundamentally why is it enticing to gossip to other people? There are a lot of reasons. One, almost everyone except very healthiest among us has a mental pecking order in their brain and everyone fits into a slot somewhere. Everyone you meet, everyone you see driving in the car, picking their nose, you're down a couple spots. Somebody gets an ugly divorce down a couple spots. Somebody gets something right and that's somebody I need to aspire to be, maybe even be envious of. There's this whole ranking game that I don't think everybody plays, but I think most people play and we have our own set of rules in our own brains for what is worth this many points or that many points. And well, gossip is interesting because it helps us tabulate that. And if it's gossip, then it's usually going to be something that lowers other people in the polls. You get to see somebody take a tumble, which means you're moving up a spot or two. That's pretty exciting. Another reason that gossip is really fun is because you don't want to be appear to be flat-footed to be an outsider. If you don't have the inside or knowledge, you're not necessarily in the in group. You don't want to be sitting around and hearing about that in front of everybody after it's already common knowledge. You want to have been one of the people who knew in advance. And I also think that it's just interest level. It's way more intriguing if not everybody knows and it's not the prettiest stuff that you would put in front of people. It shatters an illusion. And yeah, it's just out of the ordinary. It's different. I mean, that's part of the reason that people glance if you see some skin, right? It's like, whoa, there isn't normally that much skin revealed. I mean, even if it's somebody really unattractive, you still glance that way because it's so weird. And out of the ordinance, the trade-ways. What's interesting at a buddy who was in the Peace Corps in Sub-Saharan Africa and the community that he lived in was there were a lot of Muslim people that lived there. And he said when they would get together for their little Peace Corps meals with all the people from the entire region, a person that was, for example, from a Fulart tribe instead of a like a Mandika-speaking tribe. He said when they get together, the person would be like, dude, something's happening to me. I saw the ladies need the other day and my heart started beating fast. He's like, what is going on? He's like, I just, this lady just was wearing shorts and I was like, whoa. He had been in the culture so long that the line had shifted, which is awesome. That means it's possible for the line to shift. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. The question you asked me was about gossip. That's probably probably too long answer for why gossip is interesting. Yeah, I don't know, man. This is heavy stuff. Okay. So we've been lingering on what is the problem. And what I'm hearing is you said that we don't know what truth is, that this spins our compasses. And when all of our compasses are spinning at once, we can do some pretty weird crap collectively. And then I followed up with the exploitative side. It appeals or incentivizes or gives license to our weaker impulses that I believe we all have. Even though I know there are people with whom I strongly respectfully disagree who would say that people are good and that we don't have those weaker impulses. I just life hasn't told me that history and life told me we do have a lot of weaker impulses and maybe at our core, we're flawed as much as we're good. Certainly we have the potential for both. And this setup seems to be causing us to choose the less impressive stuff more often. Do you feel like there's a shift toward choosing the less impressive just in general in society over the course of your life? What do you mean by less impressive? Because I think you might mean the opposite. Given two options, complexity or simplicity, beauty or pop, nuance or simplicity, look, it's implicit in my question is that I think there is. I'm interested to hear if you think that we seem to pick the easier, the less complex, the less impressive more often now, or if you think it's steady throughout your lifetime. I think there's nuance in your question there. Like, I think you're trying to describe something, but the words are kind of difficult. And this is kind of the problem, right? It's hard to explain this. I think people have a tendency to choose the option that validates what they want to think. That's what I think. Yeah, we make an emotional decision first, and then we find data and rationale to back it up later. Absolutely. Absolutely. 100%. I do that and I have to fight it. When I see something online that resonates with what I want to think, I mean, sometimes I'll direct message it to you. And unfortunately, a lot of the things I direct message to you right now come from the Babylon B. Because that unfortunate, it's pretty funny. It's satire on the whole thing. And I'm like, oh, this is what I need right now. That Twitter direct message thread between you and I is a treasure trove of us bouncing the stuff that served up to you and me that we want to be true to each other without any consequence. It doesn't sway me. It doesn't sway you. It's not meant to. It's like the one outlet I have for, yeah, this could be totally wrong, but it validates my presuppositions and I just want to put it in front of somebody without consequence. And so rather than retweeting it, it just goes to you. You are my thought dumpster. Yeah, because I won't judge you. Thank you for that, by the way. Yeah, same with you. Sometimes it'll be like, I think you like this because it makes you feel good, but I don't agree with it. And you say the same to me, but you can't say that publicly, nor should you. You shouldn't show everything you think to everyone. No, that's a terrible idea. It's just a terrible idea. And isn't that one of the weaknesses of social media? Yeah, you can commodify things that might be better to just keep in the DMs with your one good friend for a few clicks. And that can cost you your soul. At some point, I don't know when this happened, but at some point it became the thing to do where if you've been wronged by a company, the first thing you do is you go to Twitter and you put that company on blast. And it goes something like this. Well, I did like flying blankly blank airline until they missed my connection over here because of an engine problem. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah, what kind of excuses that? Yeah, make it fly. Yeah, exactly. And it's like, now I'm stranded in this airport and can't get somewhere and you just put that stuff on blast. What does it do? It's just cathartic to the person that's tweeting it. That's the only thing it does. And other people are like, oh, yeah, they didn't give me enough peanuts or whatever. What is that? I stand by my position that those stupid Coke freestyle machines are a disaster. But otherwise, I totally agree with what you're pointing out. I think that's self correcting. Yeah, I think you got me. Anyway, so well, and it's not just that you do that when a company doesn't provide the customer service you want. It is now a thing when the customer service doesn't actively advocate for the same opinions you have. You put them on blast. Yeah, that's true. That is a new thing. How about you just do the same thing to your aunt or your mom or your old high school classmate or anyone who would dain't to not think the things you already thought that you saw several posts on social media about the major think it's true. I have done better about that because of your accountability. But I do not have a spotless record on this. It's one of the things I feel the most shame about ever is stuff I just shouldn't have said or thought about people that I said well thought or worse yet even said in front of other people on the internet. I mean, for kind of a lot of my Christian, the Bible says don't do that. And yet, I've done it anyway. And what the heck? Well, here's the thing. We're not allowed to forgive you for that anymore. Even though I'm equally as guilty, I'm not allowed to forgive you because if I forgive you, it's just like condoning what you did. When did that happen? So I believe, and I believe you probably also believe the same that what's lacking in society right now. So first of all, we have the whole thing where social media companies are making boo-cues of money off of our attention. And the algorithms that are selecting what goes in front of our faces are driven by our own choices, which are morally wrong, like as far to the right on that line as possible, which means we're being fed garbage that we selected. And now we're blaming the social media companies for feeding it back to us. Because we told these algorithms what we wanted. You ever heard somebody say I'm messing up my algorithm? I have. I've heard me say it. Yeah, I need to search for this thing. Here it goes. I'm going to mess up my algorithm. Because anyway, so that's one whole category. This other category over here is let's hate everybody and don't forgive anybody. Those are There are two separate problems in my mind. - Yeah. - I think forgiveness is the answer for the one problem. The problem of them are they. - Forgiveness and just the belief that people can change. - Yeah. - If you are living life right now, and you don't believe people can change, what's the point? If I am living life and I don't think people can change, if I'm graceless, that means I don't think I can change. And I know I'm not perfect already, which means I need to change. But I can't change, I can't change, I can't change. That's the darkest belief I think you can possibly give into. Of course people can change. Of course people are not what they are right this second or what they did on their worst tweet or their worst day. But again, that sounds so easy to say, sitting here in my comfy room, talking with my buddy, but you send me out in the wilds and the belief that nobody changes, people are stupid. This is just how things are now. That's alluring to me. I can get suckered into that mentality, but it's dark. Gotta fight it. - What's so interesting is, in the social media manipulation series I did on the Smarter Every Day, one of my solutions was be nice to people on the internet. - Yeah, I like that one. - I did too. And what I kept getting back was, oh, you were so naive, Destin. You just don't get it. You don't understand how bad they are. - Oh yeah, I saw you get spoken like someone who's in a position of privilege. - Oh yeah, I did get that. That was one I guess. - Yeah, you're just privileged enough to talk about forgiving people or being kind to others. - Which is true, by the way. I do feel like I have privilege in my life. Oh, many different levels. - I feel like most people would have to acknowledge they have privilege somewhere. I mean, here's one we all have. We live in the 2020s. Congrats. - What confused me about that one was, it was an argument against, I don't know, against forgiveness. I couldn't wrap my brain around it, but I do. - It's a dark heart. You're not gonna wrap your brain around that one. - Yeah, it was weird. Okay, so that's one problem, the forgiveness issue. Let's go back and put this spotlight back on the social media thing. - Sure. - So we have this algorithm that's being hardened to serve up what we want. - Yes. - And we want bad things. - Yes. - And it's doing exactly what it's supposed to do very, very well. How do you fix that one? - Wait, what is it supposed to do? I'm not sure we've nailed that down fully. What did you understand? Is the driver behind all of this, according to the documentary? - Money. - Yeah, I think so too. That's how I read it. - Yeah. - You've looked closely at World War I. I'm sure the technology, the military stalemate that is perfectly epitomized in the image of trench warfare. We had just enough of the right killing technology and defensive technology to grind everything to a miserable disease-infested stalemate that just killed and killed and killed with no hope of ever resolving anything. It was a bummer moment technologically, but it was a fluke moment. And I feel like we're in one of those fluke moments right now in the market, in technology, in the evolution of our ethics and how we think of each other. It feels like trench warfare. We're just dug in in this weird, really difficult and possible place. And World War I ended. The log jam got broken eventually. But I do think this is an odd little spot in the market where, understandably, people don't want to regulate speech. That's one of our values in our country and the Western tradition in general. Understandably, there's money in speech and ideas. And then you just have this shocking breakthrough, this giant leap forward in communication and words and technology. And we just weren't built to think through the implications, but the market force keeps rolling, whether we're built to think through the ethical implications or not, and then you get what we have here. Does that square with what you're seeing? Well, that makes sense, but it's a little more nuanced than that because I was in Silicon Valley a while back and I was at dinner with a person who was very, very powerful. You don't know this person's name. Oh, that kind of powerful. I can't really explain who this person was. The whole dinner was off the record just because, you know, I'm friends with this person or at least, okay, good acquaintances with this person. And so we were talking about the things associated with this person's job. And I was making a very impassioned plea. I said, look, the problem with the system right now is the algorithms that you guys use will serve up this thing to people and it'll serve up the one that you know they will watch. And they were like, yeah, yeah, there were multiple people at the table. Yeah, that's true. And I said, you have an open loop system. And in a control algorithm, you make a choice and then you see what the output is and then you make an adjustment to the input based on the output. So you have a closed loop system. And I said, your algorithm is open loop. And they said, no, it's not. It is very closed loop. They said, we can, with almost perfection, figure out exactly what we can put in front of this person that they'll watch it. And I said, no, no, no, you don't understand. Because you don't know what you're doing to the person. The person is not in the equation. There is not a way to measure the effect that the content is having on this person. And the content in this case was something on their particular platform. And they said, no, we do know that. We have surveys that we give people and they tell us. And I was like, that's horse crap. That's adorable. Do you really think that a survey that says, this made me feel happier, sad, is going to give you truth on this? Because it's not. And I got, I don't know, you've seen me bow up. I did that thing where I was like, I guess I have. I was trying to inject doubt in their minds as aggressively as I could. I said, no, this is not true. You do not know the outcomes of the content on the human heart. There is no variable. There's not a scalar in this algorithm that is contentment or happiness. Because happiness might mean, oh, well, that person is fueled by money. So they're happier because they want money more. You don't have a way of measuring that. You don't have a way of measuring goodness in a person. Or, or knowing what it is. Right. I don't know who you were talking to, but whatever company they work for, they're not the arbiter of goodness and beauty. And I don't want them to be. And I don't frankly think they have the skill set to get that right. I don't think they're their arbiter. And I don't think they're trying to be. But for example, let's think of this through. If I could design a perfect algorithm, I mean, that's a hard question to ask. I mean, we're criticizing the thing that these people are doing. But it's a difficult question. So for example, what I would want to know is content A or content B that I can serve up these people. Which one is more likely to make them still be married in five years. You know what I'm saying? You're thinking like my old job. I am the algorithm. And I got to think for seven days about what to do with this next text we're going to look at together. And I'm not just spewing it out to the whole internet. I'm talking to 300 people in one space. And I'm trying to think of what they need, what's our conversation, where people at, how are people hurting? So yeah, I very much understand what you're saying. I think. Yeah, but that is a fundamentally different problem than how can we keep this person on this device longer because we have the opportunity to serve up another ad. And that's what I thought the social dilemma program got really, really right. When they had that avatar of the person floating on the screen. Yes. And they had the matrix. In the matrix. And they had three people huddled around them. And they're like, how can we keep this person engaged? And one person would say, oh, well, we could serve in this content. No, no, no, we don't want to do that. We've done that too much. What if we did this? Yeah, do that. Boom. And they would do it. And then the person on the, the right as you're facing the person, the person on the right would be like, boom, we sold that ad for 3.5 cents. And I thought that was such a clever, a clever way of illustrating what the algorithm is doing by kind of putting people to it and showing that if a person were to do that, I wouldn't like it. Yep. I wouldn't like them. Yeah. So why is it okay for it to happen? I thought that was wonderfully done. Did you agree with that, that that was well done? Yeah. Oh, it was brilliant. What I thought was interesting though is the way they bounced from that right into something that didn't really involve the algorithm at all. And maybe a little bit, but the saddest part of the whole thing for me was the kid's sister, the little girl who couldn't stand 10 seconds without her device at dinner and smashed open the phone locking thing that her mom put everything in so they could have a quiet dinner as a family. And nobody knows what to talk about when mom locks up the phones and they hear a buzz over there in the container and middle school girl can't handle it. She goes and smashes it with a wrench or something and this just disappears upstairs. That was pretty compelling, but when she went upstairs, she posted what effectively looked like a snapchat picture. I think she was on TikTok is what they were saying through most of it, but whatever. And it has no filter and it only gets two likes. And she's sad. And then she goes for a facial expression and a posture that I would describe as more provocative than her first post. So she deletes the first post. It does a more exaggerated, cutesy, flurty kind of photo. Doctors it up with, I mean, bourbon street style. eyeshadow and exotic lipstick filters and just goofy stuff. It's off this way over the top. And then she gets more comments and likes and she feels better for a minute. And then some girl jumps in and makes a very ambiguous comment that could just be saying, "Oh, you should have used the new elephant to your filter." Maybe that's all she meant. Maybe she met your ears her too big. I don't know if it was biting or not. And the writing on that was great because you couldn't tell. But immediately the little girl sitting alone in her room and you know the squishy heart I have for little girls because of the two that I have and how much I love them. And my heart hurt so dang bad when that beautiful, sweet little girl staring at her stupid glowing rectangle pulled her hair down over her ears so that you couldn't see that anymore. She hid that part of who she was. And I don't even know if she got criticized about her ears or not. That was ambiguous. She changed her life in the story. And I think we can all think of something. I think you can think of something. I think everybody sitting in the third chair can think of something that somebody said one time who knows what they meant or if they were jealous or what their motives were but they said it and it changed the way you carried yourself, the way you thought of yourself. It gave you a thing, a paranoia about the way you smile, the way you laugh, the way you crack jokes, the way you handle your business, a party or in a conversation or the way your eyebrows are shaped or who knows what it was. But you heard it and it changed you and they did a great job of capturing that moment in that fictitious little girl's life that her life got changed by a remark and what sucked about that is there wasn't much algorithm involved. But she wasn't there with the other human to read their body language to feel it out to know what to do with it. And so she was even at a greater disadvantage that you or I were when somebody made fun of our ears or our eyebrows or our face or our shirt or my poverty growing up or whatever it was and she just sat alone in a room and was sad and was hurt and it changed her and that that was the part of the show that hurt me the most. Okay, so this is an interesting thing I would like to do now. We're talking about algorithms and how the internet works and how things get served up to people and all that. Since we're in the middle of talking about this, I would like to mention this. There is this thing on Apple podcasts on an iPhone or something you can go to the podcast app. There are ways to leave a review for this podcast, no dumb questions. And you can actually write a review and leave four or five stars or even one if you hate us. And I think. Well, you hear you here. I don't know. Yeah, why are you here if you hate us? But I think it would be interesting to mention this on this episode because this is a way to get us up in the rankings. And since the search and discovery algorithms that are used to serve up, you know, random podcasts to people use this stuff, it would be great if people would leave a review preferably positive, right? Preferably. What are your thoughts on that? My thoughts are you are so much better going right through the front door than me. I do this over on my podcast. I'm like, Hey, guys, you can't see it, but I've got this hat. It's in my hands and I'm holding it down in my waist. And like, I do this just if you wanted to, like, it could. I mean, maybe you could. And you're just like, Hey, this gets us up in the rankings. Please do it. Yeah. I think you're better at this than me. Another organization has made a large podcast with a lot of money and funding behind it. And it is named very similar to no dumb questions. And you and I spent a lot of time before, you know, naming this podcast, thinking about what we wanted it to be broad. We wanted it to be about us learning things. And so I'm very happy with the name, no dumb questions. But do you remember what the backup name was? Do you remember what the runner up was? Winchilled time. We were thinking about Winch. Nice job. Yeah. Yeah. Winchilled time. Yeah, but I think we, I think we named it correctly. And I think other people think we've named it correctly because they're trying to name it things very, very similar to this. But, you know, we got the trademark and all that good stuff. So I'm glad we did that. Long story short, it would be great if you would go consider going to the I was called is it, it's not iTunes anymore. It's just the podcast. Podcast. I don't know. Podcast. Podcast app. Yeah, the podcast app on Apple, if you could consider leaving a review and I would like to just read a couple of them because a lot of people have put time into this. And you can always tell if it's a person that really listens like they'll change their name. Here's one. Yes, you should listen. One, one name of this review is and it says the best possible thing to listen to, North Carolina. And you're like, Oh, that sounds like somebody just inauthentically put that in there. You know, that sounds like Matt and Destin typing on a keyboard. But then you see that the name of the person that said that is third chair and winged to Sar. And you're like, okay, then you high five them. Yeah, exactly. Podcast. You know your friend that that person gets it. And as a winged to Sar, they are a supporter on Patreon. So anyway, it's kind of fun to read these reviews and most of them are five star reviews. This is what I'm going to call out this person here. I just don't understand your logic. They left a four star review and it says this podcast is great. Amazing to be. Five stars. Yeah. It says this podcast is great. Amazing to binge for long car rides. The flaw is that they come out what seems like every month. It might be two weeks or whatever, but it seems like a month. So if you could be changed to it sooner, that would be great. And I would give you five stars. What? But we literally do two a month and have since 2017. I know, but I took a star off for that. I just want to I just would like to say if one of the hosts were completely bald as a cue ball, I might give this five stars. Like what? We got that covered too. Well, the thing is it's a I don't know if they come out. It seems like every month, it might be two weeks, but it seems like a month. So if it could be changed, then I might give you five. Another thing is what you're saying is I enjoy this so much I want more of it. Therefore, I'm going to give it a negative review. Yes, that's what I'm reading it. And I'm going to hurt them. I just don't understand the logic. I just don't. That's the thing. It's funny. It's funny that in this day and age, four out of five is a negative review. It is. It's really anything but five is, isn't it? Yeah. It's strange. It's interesting. I just picked out those two things, but there are so many positive. I'm very grateful for all of you who've taken the time to go over there and fill out the little podcast review thing and rate the podcast on Apple Podcast. I'm grateful. It helps us in the search algorithm, which as you know, in this little episode here about the social dilemma, unfortunately, that's the arms race we're a part of. But anyway, I like reading these things. Do you have one you want to read, Matt? Yeah. Here's one that I appreciated. It made my heart soft. Dance your booty off. Right. I love how they set a platform for anyone, all caps, for many background or educational background to understand and listen. I appreciate the hard conversations and the just plain goofy conversations. One moment is deep and philosophical and the next is sarcasm and jokes. It's great stuff. One of my favorites. Yeah. That's kind of the rhythm of it. Reading these, I really enjoy it, man. I really like looking through these and with the exception of that one guy that left the weird. I don't know. I'm grateful for everyone that took the time to actually go over to the little review section on Apple Podcasts and actually leave review. It helps. You know what? I haven't actually left a review and I don't think I'm going to because it feels like that would be inauthentic behavior and I'm not going to participate in that. So you haven't reviewed our own podcast. I haven't because I don't feel like I am. I don't think I can do that. That feels like disinformation because it's a conflict of interest. Because you think it's actually pretty terrible and so you can give it five stars. You'd feel like you're being pretty dishonest. I am a man of integrity. Anyway, thank you for everyone for considering leaving a review over there and really appreciate it. I do read those. Thanks. I remember the exact moment that happened to me. Come on. Little high school, it would have been 1994, 1994. There's this little connector between two halls and it's kind of like a little shortcut. I was taking the connector and you kind of walk uphill a little bit and I was just a little bit of a kid in school with all these big high school people. And two kids were walking the opposite way. I had no friends. This was the first time I had gone to this school. I was still in the trying to make friends phase, which ended up being really good for me as a person. It was very good developmentally. This kid was walking by and he goes, "Hey kid." I was like, "Oh my gosh, somebody's talking to me." He said, "Nice helmet." I kept walking and I was like, "I'm not wearing a helmet." And then I went and washed my hands in the. It's so funny. I went and washed my hands in the bathroom and looked at my hair. I had a helmet head and it was awesome. And I thought that was brilliant. You know, that was amazing because it was a very nuanced way to bully or pick somebody, but it was also kind of funny. So I saw the humor in it and I kind of connected with the guy because I don't know. It didn't bother me. That was it. It was over. And I still thought about how my hair cut looked moving forward, but it was between me and it was between him and nobody else knew. And now you know. And the whole internet. Now do that in front of everybody. Get the state of Alabama and say, "Okay, we're going to look at this person and we're going to comment on what they look like." like we're going to comment on things about this person they can't change. That's tough. Is it ever and you still get that and I still get that. Yeah. And we're adults and we have kids and that almost never even gets close to getting through the armor. I don't even feel that stuff. If I'm to be honest, every once in a great while, there are a couple of buttons that can be pushed just the right way. But even then, even the worst thing that somebody says to me in a YouTube comment doesn't come anywhere close to the most fleeting thing. Somebody said to me when I was in seventh grade, wildly insecure and just wanted somebody to like me and wanted to know and be known like all people want. And that's really what's being exploited in that scene. That's really what's being exploited, even if it's a faceless exploitation with no obvious villain, nobody to point at. That's what's happening there, except it is happening in front of everybody. Seventh grade me. I just couldn't have handled it, man. I would have done nothing but think about the things people thought was wrong with me all the time. And I would have tried to use my stupid little glowing rectangle device to tweak and improve my image in a way that, you know, what's going to be enough? What is ever going to be enough? How many likes? How many followers? How many people who say that your picture looks great and you don't have elephant ears? How many times did you need to hear that to offset the ambiguous comment? It's heartbreaking. And it's not a way to raise kids. So I just picked up my phone because I wanted to tell you about this person that I've been following on Instagram that talks a lot about this stuff. And I picked up my phone to search for the person's name. And as soon as I popped Instagram up, there was a person on it with a six pack doing way more pull ups than I ever could do. And I looked at it and I was like, I can't do that. And I don't have abs like that. Isn't that crazy? Now we're sitting here talking about this. Anyway, transition away from that. It just knows. Yeah, it just knows. Okay. So the person I want to talk to you about again, Colin Carchner, he started a program called Save the Kids. Okay. And the whole deal is like, he'll say this over and over and over. He just simply says it quit giving kids smartphones. Stop. I agree. Stop giving kids smartphones. I agree. And take away the ones you've already given them. Yeah, that's easy to say, right? It's very difficult to do, especially if you want to keep up with your kids. So there are a couple of companies that I've been researching recently. I tweeted about this a while back. I was like, Hey, I need to know what are kids say phones, so to speak. I didn't see the tweets. What'd you come up with? A ton of different things. There's several different companies that do this, but there's two in particular. I want to talk about one of them is called a GAB phone, GAB wireless. Dot com. All right. So this is a phone that looks like a smartphone, but it has a calculator. It has text messaging. It has phone, like phone calls. And it also has the ability to take photos and it has maps. So you can get to somewhere you need to go. That's it. It looks like a smartphone. Absolutely. So this is the, this is the social equivalent in high school of getting the red, so low cup and putting some apple juice in it. Like look, look what I have. See, I'm one of you. I've got the thing. Yeah, I guess that's true. I've never done that, but that makes total sense. It's like a social camouflage, maybe, but the trick is kids are hanging out today. Anyway, so it doesn't matter, right? Ain't that the truth? So yeah, that's exactly what it is. And so this is what I'm not going to let my daughter listen to this, but she is of the age where she's going to sports practices. She's going down the street to do certain things and we need to keep in touch with her. And the only thing we have right now is an old iPhone. That is an open portal to everything. Yeah. And there are many different things you can have. Like at our house, we have this device called Circle. It's actually owned by Disney, but you can, it's basically a firewall, a family firewall. And you can tailor the firewall based on the device that's hooked up to it. So for example, on your phone, you pull up your circle and it shows your house and it shows all the different people that are connected to your circle. And so you can set Mommie's internet privileges a little bit higher than, you know, little Johnny's. And you can also turn internet on and off for different devices at different times of day. So you can say, boom, eight o'clock, all internet goes off. You can say, we're going to set the content moderation for all the devices that are owned by little Johnny. We're going to set them to high content moderation. We're going to set moms to unfiltered, for example, you can do all these different things. So that's one tool. But this gab wireless, they have a new phone called the Z2 that has all these things I was telling you about. There's another company that reached out and just like, just to be totally clear to everybody. This is the first I've ever heard of gab wireless and there's no like sponsorship thing or no sponsorship whatsoever. You throw stuff out. Right. Cool. This is an email that was sent to me. I get a lot of email just like you do. Hey, Descent Tara, back in July, you tweeted about a minimal phone for kids. Da, da, da, da, we're a startup. In launching our phone, that would absolutely be perfect for you guys. We think your kids would love it. Not sure if you bought anything yet, but I'm happy to send you a couple for free. We believe in what you guys stand for on so many levels. And this founder, the company is techless.com T E C H L E S S says the world's healthiest smartphone. So I'm sitting here and looking at the website, don't have this phone. World's healthiest smartphone, no apps, no addictions, no distractions. I'm going to get one of these from my daughter, who's of the age where she needs to connect. What's so great about my daughter is she gets it. She'll tell me, Dad, why are you on your phone right now? You're absolutely right. I'm so sorry because I'm addicted. I'm addicted to the phone. Yeah, just like you, my job's on the phone totally. When we post this episode, we're going to post it in many different places online. And we're going to have to monitor that. And we're going to see like, okay, look, check it out. There's somebody saying bad things again. We should probably address that somehow. You know, there's a person trying to make us sad for no reason. We should, we should just nuke that whatever spoiler alert. If you're dumb, I delete your stuff. It's a no problem. If you don't want to, if you don't want your stuff deleted, don't be dumb. Just be nice. It's just that simple. That's a great life rule, right? That it'll always work. Yeah. Yeah, I tell you what I say that all the time. I say, this is what I do for a living. I have to be present. I have to be attentive. I'm a dad. What if I use the exact same language for my family? It's just I justify, I justify blowing time on stupid things on my phone. And when I get a window of time, a little sliver, a little in between thing, I used to go into my mind palace and think thoughts about important things. And what I'd like to do, I would just think about people in my life and what I could do. And I would strategize about how I could show them care, do something cool for them. Now I play a stupid game or worse, I scroll through Twitter and get bombarded with the worst thoughts that are happening in all of humanity at any given day, at any given time. And I miss the useful in between time. So we watched the social dilemma and I was like, I'm putting books back by my bed. So I'm going to need a light by my bed, which is something I've taken away. It used to always be there. I don't have that now because the phone provides its own light and I could just read on the phone. But I won't just read on the phone. It's not the same. It doesn't mean the same thing. Stuff means stuff and me pulling a book from my nightstand and reading it on that page, a page that can only be used for one thing. The ink that's on it right now. I guess you could recycle it for something later, but that's effectively it. That means something different than a temporal screen that flashes 10 billion different things across it for different applications, even a night or two of doing this. And I feel the synapses firing that haven't been. I feel connections happening in my mind that weren't there. I feel something happening to my soul that regrettably has been a little more dead than I thought. And the only change I've made in light of this documentary is I'm going to try to use the in-between space just a little bit less on phone stuff and social media and instead use it on thinking about thoughts and ideas and people. That's it. It's the most minimal change ever. And I could immediately feel the things that had atrophied in my soul, stretching their muscles just a little bit. And I mean, what will it be like if those things come back to life? I didn't even know they were dead. And I just started. I just started last week too. I did something a while back. I bought a book on a special type of rocket called the Cintar. It's the second, it's like the most efficient second stage rocket engine ever made, a rocket system ever made. And it's a hydrogen rocket that we've used for years in the US to push things to Mars and just wherever they need to go. I bought a book called Taming Hydrogen and I set it by the toilet. And I just sat it there and I was like, this would be cool. And so I read a little bit of it. Please forgive me for the visual here, but let's just be real. You all use your phones on the toilet. Yep. And so I just sat it there and there's this other toilet and I sat a book there called the Conquest of Peru. And that was cool and all. And then I went and I read like the first couple of chapters over an extended period of time. And then I just kind of quit. Well, I went the other day to the use bookstore and I went to the textbook section. I've studied fluid dynamics, like quite a bit, on many different levels. And I saw an old school fluid dynamics book and I bought it. I was like, this is pretty cute, you know. This would make a good decoration. And when I went up for it to buy it, the guy said, hey, this is the fifth edition. There's a sixth edition back there that's green. Did you see that? I was like, no. He said, I'll make a deal for you. If you go get the sixth edition, I'll give you both of them for free. I was like, you're just trying to get rid of him. He said, dude, they've been here forever. Nobody wants them. I was like, yeah, I'll get it. So I went and got it and I said it by the toilet. And I opened it for just a couple of minutes the other day and I solved a problem that I've been trying to figure out just because I opened it. And I was like, you know what? I'm not going to say no phone. I'm just going to try to like, wean myself off the phone at least just a little bit. And that opened that dang book and I looked at it and I was like, oh, yeah. Okay, cool. Yeah, this is a moody diagram, obviously. And then I was, that's what I've been trying to figure out. And I just figured the thing out because I had a physical smells like paper book in my hand. It does something different. I could choose what I could explore. Like I could flip the pages wherever I wanted and nothing was suggested to me. It's like, wait, okay? I'm going to go that way. Okay, cool. Yeah, that's, yeah. I understand Reynolds number. Okay, what page? Okay, that page. Boom, I'm there. Yeah. When someone else is directing your path, when you're trying to discover things, but they're constantly throwing like young females with six packs in front of you while you're trying to uncover the mysteries of the universe, you're not going to get there. You remember that Pontch's pilot project that did a while back? Yeah. We did a conversation about it here and that's right. That's maybe the most dialed I have been research wise since the age of smartphones. But I do that every week. And I think you just epiphonized me because what I love about my little office here and my stack of books is that most of the answers I need for what I study and what I do are not found on the internet. It just isn't the best resource at all. And it is this journey through my library. And I've got the same, you know, 1000 books or whatever I got sitting around here that I've had for a while. But it's just that. There's no algorithm telling me to do anything. It's the knowledge. It's the quest that takes me to the next thing. And if it's been a good day, I'm here on my desk and I've had to move my folded up laptop aside because I need more room for open books all at once, spread out across my desktop with my, and I've been doing this too for about a year. I don't, I don't write anything on the computer anymore for what I do. I write it all in notebooks. And I don't know what I'm going to do with the notebooks. It just feels like I'm accessing a different part of myself that I like better, that orders, thoughts and words better when I use a writing utensil and I write it on a sheet of paper. And whether what I put on that sheet of paper is good or not, a tough luck. That's it for that sheet of paper. It was used on those thoughts on that day. And tomorrow they'll be a fresh sheet and we'll see what we get out of that. That stuff means stuff. And the process you described sitting on that toilet reading that fluent dynamics book and what I'm describing sitting around doing my research is just different than goofing around on the phone. And it just feels like you're never quite getting traction trying to do thought online or on the phone. I just had a thought. Let's hear it. I don't know. This is personally profound, but I think it's something that's about to happen. Tell me. Have you noticed that people are taking online content and turning it into books? Tell me what you mean. I've been asked to write a forward to a National Geographic book or something like that and I did it. And I was like, yeah, I like the people there. I'll do it. And so I just wrote this forward for them. And I went through and I looked at the content of the book. I was like, oh, this is a lot of stuff you can find online. You know, and the facts and dates and stuff like that, they'll have websites that they're cross referencing in the book. Do you know what happened the moment the nuclear bomb went off for the first time? That fundamentally changed a lot of things in the world. Like, for example, if you have some type of radiation detector that you're going to build, you can't build it out of steel that was smelted and formed after 1944 or whenever the first bomb went off. Did you know that? Yeah, you've told me about this. Yeah. So the steel is tainted. The ideal steel, if you're going to make something is to go to the bottom of the ocean and find a battleship that was from World War One and go get that raw steel and bring it up and machine it because it went through the best summer process before the nuclear age. So it hasn't been tainted by all that stuff. I think the same is happening right now with books. I think you and I for entire lives have had the ability to go to the library, get books that haven't been tainted by the misinformation age and the weaponization of misinformation against each other and just the signal to all your ratio going just through the floor. We've had that ability. I think there's going to be an age moving forward in the future where we're going to be like, oh, if you want to know things, you need to get books that were written pre-1993 or whatever. Yes. I think that's brilliant. And I would add to it this, buddy. If you want to hear a good story, you need to get one pre-2010. It is not a coincidence that all of the characters quit having problems around 2010. Now people's problems are my feelings are hurt or I was sad or something bad happened to me and I have to let the world see how great I am anyway. Back then the problems were like porn addiction or gambling or you killed somebody or you said something horrible and ruined a relationship or no matter how much you try, you just can't get out of the your own way because you keep screwing this thing up. And then the characters have to overcome that and fix it. But for whatever reason, that story, the people who make these decisions, they don't think that story and that character resonates. But everybody has thought that flawed character resonates as far back as storytelling goes. But in the last 10 years, it kind of broke. Now there are exceptions, of course there are exceptions and it's generally the best stuff from the last 10 years that are the exceptions. But if you want a great story that's brave and that will say something that hasn't been run through the filter of what you say and what you don't say, you have to go pre-2010 because it'll surprise you. They'll think things you'll find just appalling that it would probably took a lot of bravery for them to say even if you think it was dumb bravery. They'll say things you're like, "What? Wow, I didn't know anybody thought that thing." That's kind of refreshing to hear somebody think that. It's the same thing is happening there. I think some bomb went off and I blatantly arguing that I think it's the social media bomb and that the particles of that yuck got into all of the storytelling and all of the narrative. And if you want something good, you got to get something off the bottom of the ocean pre-2010. That's interesting. I don't have my ear to the ground of that sort of thing. I'll have to be looking for that. If you want to test the theory, look for this. Increasingly, characters are all Mary Sues. They represent something that maybe writes a wrong or make things better but the characters of Mary Su, that being they don't have any problems to overcome. The problems are all external to them and they have to become brave enough to defeat everyone else's badness. And that's the story. Now that I've said it, you know, beta mind-hoff syndrome, you'll see it everywhere. Interesting. Okay, here's the deal, dude. We can talk about this all day. Here's my promise to you. If you give your young kids a smartphone, I will personally get on an airplane, come to wherever you are and I will slap you with a fish. Okay. If you give your kids a smartphone, I will. I would say I've kicked your tail but I can't say that because that would be too aggressive for today's society. Okay, I'll tell you what I'll do to you offline but it's bad. Yeah, that's right. And yeah, it involves a sock full of rocks. I know there are people listening to this who are like, "Now my kids have smartphones. It's going great. I'm fine with it." Okay, look, I'm not trying to pick a fight with you third chair. Whatever you think is good. I'm sure you're a great parent and it's just not mine to go and judge what everybody else does. But between you and I, my friend, I'm not doing it. We sat the kids down a week ago and we're like, "Hey, you know we're never doing this, right? And here's why." And they're great with it. They know what the deal is. No surprise. This may come as a surprise. They're well adjusted and normal. They're doing great with that one. The way we did it is my kids made presentations on what they want and my daughter has been wanting to ride horses. And so she gave us a presentation on why she should be allowed to go back to horse practice, which is something that we had found a person that would let her come over and ride horses, pre-pandemic or whatever. And she made a presentation on why she should do it again. And of course, you know, the big discussion about grades and responsibilities and all this stuff came up. Well, this opportunity came up for this lady that was going to college. She can't keep her horse anymore. And we found a neighbor that has a field that's fenced in. And the deal is this lady is going to let this horse go to that field as long as my daughter will feed it and take care of it while she's in college. And the neighbor is excited about it because that means my daughter is going to go over there and like keep up the barn and stuff. And so we literally have to pay for only hay and my daughter has access to a horse. How about that? Horses live a long time, yes, like 30 years. This is a 20-something year old horse. And so she is beside herself excited because she is going to get to interact with a physical horse every day. And I could not be happier for her. I think we're just going to lean into that. I bought a saddle from a yard sale on the way home for 45 bucks. And she was telling me all about the saddle. She's like, "Well, this is a Western saddle. It's not an English saddle." But it's in surprisingly good condition. How much did you pay for this dad? I was like, $45. She said, "No way." This is like a $200 saddle. I was like, "Great. I have no idea what you're talking about." So I'm so excited. A son wants a dirt bike and I was able to convince my better half that it was acceptable as long as he earned the money to do it. Well, to be clear, he convinced us of that. He gave us a presentation. And so I'm just leaning into the outdoors, man. Yeah. I'm leaning in to letting my kids pick something they want to do. And yeah, you're probably going to get hurt. Mm-hmm. Oh yeah. I'm going to have to come to terms with that. And it's a calculated risk. Your physical body will be at risk. However, your heart and your soul will be nurtured somewhat protected. Yeah. Yeah. And again, we're at can't stress enough. People are going to play it the way they need to play it. They're running different calculations. Somebody can love their kid a whole bunch and not do it the way you and I do it. Maybe they see something we don't see. That said, I personally really resonate with what you're going for. And it's part of why we're friends. And probably come out the world similarly on some of these things. Due to be clear, I feel like we won the lotto on the horse thing. That just doesn't happen. Yes, you did. Yeah, you did pretty well. You want a scratch ticket with the saddle thing. I'm excited about it. So big picture. Land in the plane, if you will. We talked about this social dilemma documentary. We talked about the big opening question they had, which is what is the problem? I feel like we hashed that through pretty well. We talked about how it happened. Which is a big question they wrestled with. Then you and I went down the rabbit hole a little bit on how it manifested, how it manifested in our lives, how it manifested in society. That's the place where we could probably spend 10 hours and still not feel like we've fully even touched it or got started on it. And then without really announcing it, we drifted into the how do you respond. You talked about different smartphone options for kids. We talked about reading books and doing work offline and writing with pen and paper and going out and getting a horse doing a sport, doing something, interacting with people. I don't feel like again, we've really got all the way into the question of how to respond. On the documentary, they threw out some stuff like turn off all notifications. I don't know. I'm going to do this. Tell me. One thing they pulled up in the thing and they said, when you wake up in the morning, do you seek out the other person that's in your life and tell them good morning or do you roll over and check your phone? So I literally have Amazon pulled up right now and I'm looking for alarm clocks. Yeah. I'm going to see if I can get my phone out of the bedroom. There's no way I can do that, man. I think you can. I'm legitimately addicted to my phone. I don't think you will be. I'll try to do that. I think you can change it. People can change. You can change. I want to change. I want to change it. Let's do it. Let's change it. Yeah. Let's do. All right. So I think we understand each other. No cell phones for kids, at least between you and I and we will continue to DM things to each other privately. And that's the whole take home of the whole thing. Yeah. Those are good practical applications. You're right. To me, the big picture take home is we really do have a problem here. We're all complicit in our own ways in this problem. And it really is hurting us. It's making us be enemies with people. We don't need to be enemies with. It causes division and strife and the documentary use the phrase real world crossover. And I really like to be a part of making that better. I've said that for a long time. I don't know if I'm getting anything done or not, but I'd really like to be a drop in the bucket of better instead of another drop in the bucket of not better. Yeah. Well, I'm literally going to go to dinner with my family and put my phone away and look at them in the eyes and ask them how their day was. So that's happening. I like the way you're thinking. Have a good time with the bucket. So goodbye internet. I'm out. Goodbye internet. See you later. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]