Netflix's 'Social Dilemma' Star Tristan Harris on the Film and Its Criticisms

You won’t find a more controversial film in Silicon Valley than The Social Dilemma. The film, now available on Netflix, features confessions from early consumer internet employees who rue the destruction their inventions have wrought. To address the film and its critiques, Tristan Harris, its star and the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, sat down for an interview on the Big Technology Podcast with no questions off limits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 0:43Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  How are you?

• 1:04Speaker 01

  I'm all right. How are you doing?

• 1:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  I'm good. I appreciate you doing this. I feel like I'll probably lose some credibility because there were parts of the movie that I really liked. And it seems like, at least in the tech circles, it's gotten a little bit of pushback, but I'm excited to be able to talk about it with you.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, we will talk about it, I'm sure, any of the aspects. Feel free to be critical. This is not meant to be one-sided propaganda. It's meant to be an honest assessment of what is the situation. So, yeah.

• 1:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally. Okay, well, we'll get into it. Let me just roll the music and we can get started.

• 1:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Hello and welcome to the Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. Joining us today is the star of the Social Dilemma movie, the co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and someone whose work I've been following for a while. And I'm looking forward to a good, intense conversation about the movie and his work. And we'll just go for it. So it's Tristan Harris. Welcome to the show.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

• 2:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let's just, you know, start kind of with with your life. Your your house burned down in the middle of the Sonoma fires or Santa Rosa fires. Is that right?

• 2:33Speaker 01

  Um, yeah, that that just happened a few days ago, so we're reeling from that. It's a pretty, pretty significant event.

• 2:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. How are you holding up and where are you staying?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  Um, well, you know, luckily, we have a lot of different friends, so um, it's it's kind of a big deal. I mean, it was our family's house and we lost basically everything that we owned. So it's a good exercise in impermanence and non-attachment. And, uh, you know, we've still been, I've still been out there doing these interviews because it's all coincident, happening at the same time as when the film, obviously, and these issues in society and the election and how social media is impacting all of that are occurring. So, you know, just taking it day by day and figuring out, you know, soon what what the future is going to look like.

• 3:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Definitely. Well, um, you know, I'm sorry it happened. It's sort of, I mean, living in the Bay Area, it's so crazy to see all these these natural events happening and then it really brings it home when you speak with someone who it's who it's happened to. So, I hope you hang in there on that front. And in such a crazy time, I do appreciate you still hopping on the line to speak with me.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks.

• 3:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so let's talk a little bit about about the movie. So I I'd like to talk a little bit about your thesis before we get into the discussion of of what's, you know, some of the criticism and then sort of start to debate the points back and forth. But let's talk a little bit, you know, what what your main thesis is. For me, it was sort of like the tech companies are controlling our lives through algorithms. Is that, you know, sort of right? Like you said, one one line that stuck with me, you said, social media is a drug. We have a need to connect people and it preys on that. So how how close did I get to the actual thesis of what you were bringing in with the movie?

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Well, I think the the major point of the film is that a business model that is infused in the social communications infrastructure that 3 billion people live by and are dependent on is misaligned with the fabric of society and specifically poses a kind of existential threat to democracy and a functioning society, the life support systems that make up a society. Because if we don't have a common conversation or a capacity to trust and to have shared faith in the same information and to reach agreement, then nothing else works in a society. And while we've had polarized and hyper partisan media on television and radio before,

• 5:13Speaker 01

  social media has become the background upstream place that even television, radio, Fox News, MSNBC, get their information on Twitter, et cetera. So I think that that this business model of doing whatever is best for engagement will always privilege giving each person their own reality, that each time I flick my finger, you know, up to see what comes next, Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok would do better to confirm my view of reality, that I'm even more morally righteous and correct about my views and the other side is wrong, than if every single time I flicked my finger, it challenged my view of reality. Each flick is challenge, challenge, challenge, challenge.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Because the business model is directly coupled with how much time I can get you to spend, it has created a Frankenstein that is kind of run amok and pulled apart the fabric of society everywhere. And I think the film makes that point, hopefully, very clearly.

• 6:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and we talk about the business model, then there's also the side of it which is, which is that the way that they they sort of manifest that business model is using, essentially, the way that I interpreted in the movie, using algorithms in order to inflame tensions so that we can spend more time on these platforms. They'll make money, society crumbles, you know, as it goes on. Does that, does that sort of sum it up the right way?

• 6:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, we kind of profit off of our own self-destruction because the more conflict there is, the more people die, the more attention-grabbing stuff there is, the more tribalism there is, the more outrage and conspiracy thinking there is that degrades the epistemic and information ecology, the more money they make. The truth is quite boring and usually not nearly as interesting as being able to assert that, you know, Trump does or doesn't have COVID and it's a conspiracy theory, or Biden was wearing an earpiece and it's a conspiracy theory. These kinds of fanciful things to say are much more, you know, attention-grabbing than to just assume that these are two people who are very busy

• 7:19Speaker 01

  and are showing up for a debate. And that's really the core issue, is that society, you know, social media companies would say, "We're holding back a mirror to society." And this would be their critique. In fact, I think Facebook just responded to the social dilemma. We haven't had a chance to really look at it yet, but in general, what they'll say is, "We are holding up a mirror to society." If you have tribal conflict, or racism, or, you know, people disagreeing about climate change, we are just holding up a mirror to the fact that those fault lines and divisions already exist. And this is a incomplete and misleading thing for them to say, because they are in fact holding up a mirror to society.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  But that mirror is a funhouse mirror that warps and distorts the image that we see in return. Specifically, it amplifies bully-like behavior, harassment, hate speech, conspiracy thinking, addiction, outrage, you know, as Justin says in the film, because this is due to our values-blind economic logic, that whatever makes the most money or gets the most engagement is what wins. So long as that's true and corporations go unregulated, you end up with, you know, a whale is worth more dead than alive, and a tree is worth more as lumber than as a tree. In this business model, human beings, when we are the product, are worth more when we're addicted, outraged, polarized, narcissistic, and disinformed

• 8:43Speaker 01

  than if we're thriving citizens or children.

• 8:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  No doubt, and I won't argue with you. I actually agree, like, you know, it's funny that the film has definitely gotten a lot of blowback in Silicon Valley. And I sort of watched it after the criticism started to emerge. And of course, like, you're definitely going to expect a decent amount of criticism, you know, from industry. But one of the things I agree with is that these platforms do tend to inflame tensions. And but, but, but, you know, I wonder again, like, whether, well, we'll get into some of the criticism. I wonder whether it's actually, you know, the platforms doing this, or whether there's something bigger going on. But I don't think they help. So, so let's get to the first, you know, issue that that people have brought up with this view, which is, you know, some have said that it's sort of replacing, you know, one conspiracy theory with another.

• 9:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  I want to read some of the stuff that I've seen and get you to respond if you're all right with it. So Casey Newton, who writes the Interface newsletter for The Verge, although at this point, it's going to be Platformer on Substack, said, you know, this is a cartoon supervillain view of the world that strikes me as kind of a mirror image of the right wing conspiracy conspiracy theories, which hold that a cabal of elites are manipulating every world event in secret. And then Kevin Roos from the New York Times says, you know, I can see how someone who believes in QAnon could effectively replace one conspiracy theory, the cabal controls the media, with another, the cabal controls the media in California. What do you think about those claims?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  You know, I really respect Casey and Kevin's work a lot. But what's what's interesting is it seems to be a really misrepresented view of what the film says. I mean, the film doesn't say there's a group of 10 tech insiders who are deliberately and maliciously mustache twirling, you know, all the way home to the bank in bringing out the worst in society or trying to control the media. It doesn't say that at all. In fact, it says, these platforms have a mind of their own, and they've become a kind of digital Frankenstein that no one knows how it works. But all we know is that it tends to reward the worst aspects in society. And it's the insiders coming to say, look, I, you know, helped build this thing. And there's more authority, and the human mind in terms of what's persuasive. It's one thing if you have many researchers, who, by the way, there are so many researchers,

• 11:00Speaker 01

  and especially, you know, black and women of color, who've been sounding the alarm on some of the social impacts of technology for a long time, and how its effect marginalized communities. And you know, but the film is rhetorically powerful because there are, it's the first time that I think the insiders who were there at that time can say, you know, here are some of the harms that are emerging from these decisions that were made innocuously. And no one knew that it would lead to this harm. So I don't actually think that the film, you could draw the conclusion from the film that there's a secret cabal of insiders that are trying to manipulate you. You know, maybe there's some extra marketing for getting you to watch the film saying, you know, they're all trying to do this to you. But really, if you look at the full content.

• 11:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, but it was also baked into the film. Like you see those three guys who are standing there and, you know, saying, how are we going to manipulate this person? And I hear your perspective and I also hear their perspective where I saw those scenes and I was like, well, it's, you know, maybe Tristan didn't say this explicitly, but it certainly seems like these feminizations are sort of part of the problem that the film is trying to address.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Well, that's interesting. Let's make sure we meet it head on because I really care about, you know, authentic debate here. So, so you got those three AI characters played by the guy from Mad Men, right? And there's three AIs. There's the growth AI that's trying to figure out, how do I get you to invite more people, tag more people, you know, recommend more people, things like that. You've got the engagement AI that's trying to figure out what can I show you that's going to keep you scrolling and eliminate the, you know, the bottom on the bowl and remove the stopping cues and things like that. Then you've got the advertising AI that's trying to figure out how do we make sure that each session is as profitable as possible. This is really not far from the truth at all. There are in fact a growth team that actually in Facebook's case built something called the PMYK, people you may know, or PYMK, excuse me, people you may

• 12:49Speaker 01

  know, where I actually talked to a Facebook insider from very early on who was there, who was proud at the fact that when you just let people add their friends on Facebook autonomously on their own. They would end up and hover around an average of about 150 friends, which sort of replicates the Dunbar number. The fact that we generally in tribes, you know, in the Savannah, would end up with about 150 close relationships. But that wasn't enough. When you run a growth team and you have an AI that you need to figure out, you know, we need to get people using the platform a lot. And as Chamath, the head of growth in the, in the film says, how, what was the key to addicting a user and getting you for life? It was very simple, he said. All we had to do was get you to seven users in 10 days, and then we had you for life. That's literally what that playbook said.

• 13:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  So how did they grow the number of users that you had had? Well, they actually kind of injected social, the, the user with social growth hormone, almost like we inject cows to make them produce more milk. So we said, what if we could get you to invite and grow to more friends? And the way they did that is by literally building an AI saying, who are friends who, if you were to get them to join, would likely get them to use the platform the most? So for example, if I'm Twitter, I would say, yes, you followed these first 10 users, maybe Ashton Kutcher, Demi Moore, whatever the first celebrities they had you follow are. But then when it recommends, here's more users you, you might want to follow, it picks those users based on which of them would be the most engaging so that you would come back the most often. And it has models of which users, if you were to follow them, would keep people, would keep people coming back more often.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  So that's actually a fair and pretty accurate representation. Again, not with a mustache twirl, but with an authentic set of, these were the growth goals of the company. And there's a similar thing going on with advertising.

• 14:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, let me just ask you this. Yeah, isn't there a disconnect then between, you know, we talked earlier about like, you know, okay, so there's no cabal. It is sort of these systems that we don't know how they work. But then isn't it a disconnect to portray it as, or some sort of inconsistency to portray it as these three guys who are, you know, standing there, yeah, they represent algorithms. But if the whole idea is we want to show this honestly and accurately, isn't it sort of misleading to portray it with three people who are having a conversation, you know, with each other, trying to manipulate you?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see that point. And you know, I'm speaking to you as a subject in the film, not the director or filmmaker.

• 15:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  Have the creative control or what they chose to do here. I think that's a fair critique. I think that, you know, in the cuts of the film that I saw, you know, these are meant to be systems that are simply tracking various features and then recommending things to you, which I think that's also what the dialogue represents. Now, if they look like there's a little bit of mustache twirling in the way the character shows that, maybe that's something that I'm not picking up as much because the way that the script was written, it, you know, it's supposed to be just sort of amoral algorithms that are maximizing for each of their own goals.

• 15:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. So now, you know, it's interesting because, so we talked a little bit about this sort of Q and A, like, which I don't, I don't know, I don't, I wouldn't see it as a conspiracy theory type of thing. Actually, I think the film brings up some really, you know, important points that we ought to be thinking about. And maybe like the questions are, you know, in terms of of style. But like, okay, talking about the way that it portrays, you know, like, again, like the overarching, you know, this is a system that works and you should be aware of it and sort of, you know, controls the world type of critique, like, it does talk about, you know, how all these algorithms are manipulating

• 16:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  us. And the film like, basically links it to, you know, a ton of catastrophic events, you know, or, you know, there's, there's the rise in self harm among teenage girls. There's a rise of nationalism. Okay, maybe not catastrophic, but certainly, you know, on the road there. All these things that we don't want to see in society, maybe the rise of loneliness and withdrawal, these are other impacts. And so I just sort of wonder, like, what percentage would you say of these issues that the film talks about and that you've brought about, brought up, you know, in the beginning of this conversation? What percentage, or, I mean, even it's hard to ask percentage wise, but do we really think that the Facebook algorithm is responsible for the, for all this? Or, you know, isn't

• 17:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  there other things going on in society, you know, that is, that is a, you know, responsible for these outside of the algorithms?

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's always going to be a yes and here because the trend towards loneliness and isolated atomized individuality, you know, per the book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. And these trends, you know, the elimination of shared spaces and public space, you know, fewer parks, the hollowing out of Main Street, inequality, more drug use, opioid addiction, various forms of addiction, less meaning, there's multiple overlapping crises that we find ourselves in. However, if I ask myself, okay, if there's an industry operating on a business model of addiction and engagement, let's just say engagement, right, I need you to use that platform for 45 minutes a day. And by the way, everyone else else needs to use it for 45 minutes a day. So in general, having you sit there by yourself on a screen

• 17:57Speaker 01

  is way more profitable to that entire industry than having you spend more time in community with friends over dinner tables with candles. That's just built into it. So in other words, loneliness and isolation are definitely exacerbated by that background effect that subtly wants to atomize and pull us apart. But that's much like every other aspect of our economic system. It's more profitable for each of us to buy our own lawnmower than to have one that's shared among the community and to have systems for, you know, doing that because if we're doing profit maximization, much more effective to do that. It's much more profitable for people to get diabetes and then sell you a subscription plan for treatment than to have you be healthy in the first place and to have our economic and system competing to make us healthy. In general, there's many perverse incentives

• 18:39Speaker 01

  across the landscape and technology is just giving us, specifically social media and this addiction and engagement based business model, is giving us just another version of that where it's more profitable for us to look at conspiracy theories, rabbit holes that keep us there for four hours long than to have a, you know, a set of how to videos to go do improvements across your life or teaching musical instruments because they're just not going to keep you there as long. This is important because this is not meant to vilify all technology at all. I think if YouTube was a library, like a library of Alexandria for how to make improvements in your life, learn skills, learn musical instruments, you know, do self-medical care, things like this, this would be amazing, right? And I think these are the kinds of things that people do find valuable on YouTube. We actually.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  At our house in Santa Rosa before unfortunately burned down in the fires, we used YouTube to figure out how we would supply ourselves with a generator. So that when the power would go out, how would we know how to hook this up and mix it with the gas pipeline and all of that kind of stuff? So there's incredible uses. I've taught myself to play songs on the piano because of YouTube library. Now, that's fine, but the problem is when there's a business model built on automating, where 3 billion people's attention goes in languages that the engineers don't speak. And you have cases where two years ago, a teen girl who went to watch a dieting video, what does YouTube recommend on the right-hand side for all those teen girls? Finpiration anorexia videos, because those were better at keeping attention.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  Same thing if you watch World War II historical videos and the right-hand sidebar gives you all Holocaust denial videos. And you have parents who are sitting there, kids in front of YouTube for multiple hours a day at school during COVID. And then they come to the dinner table at night and say, the Holocaust didn't happen and the earth is flat. And they wonder why this is going on. And these trends have to do with this business model that is subtly influencing the way that all of us are thinking and feeling and believing on a daily basis.

• 20:32Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and I only, I like my critique on, I agree with this largely. These are problems. My only critique is like you watch some of these montages and you're just like, social media is the root of all evil in our society. And I would have loved a little bit more nuance to that. I mean, obviously, social media is a problem, but the question is, when you look at, when you look at the percentage or you look at, you know, what, what degree of responsibility does this stuff have? I mean, I'm still kind of curious. What do you think? Like, when you think about the big picture, we're talking about, you know, the problems that we've had. You know, for instance, with our economy, that so much of the money has gone to a small percentage of people.

• 21:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it's caused a lot of, a lot of folks out there to lose hope. And that influences community. We know religion is down. I mean, maybe technology is partially responsible for that. But how responsible is technology for all the bad things that we've talked about? You know, talking about like the rise of nationalism and people not seeing each other as other human beings, et cetera, et cetera.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, you know, I appreciate you bringing up this nuance. I mean, the film isn't, I think, ever claiming that, you know, all the problems in society are coming from social media or that, you know, rising inequality or...

• 21:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it sometimes gives that impression. So, but, but, I mean, anyway, like, I know it's trying to make a point and there have been people also who were in the film who were like, we need to be like a little bit more simplistic to get this across. But, and that's sort of the reason why we want to have this discussion here is to sort of get a little more nuanced and dig in. So it's not an attack, it's just a question of like, let's...

• 22:04Speaker 01

  No, I, of course, completely, completely appreciate it. And black and white thinking is one of the, um, uh, black and white thinking is one of the externalities of the attention economy because it rewards simpler, shorter, black and white metaphors for the problem as opposed to longer, complex, nuanced, high cognitive chunk sizes, you know, for dealing with these issues. So, um, but I think that if we made a list of the claims of the film about which specific harms, you know, addiction, loneliness, teenage mental health problems, um, conspiracy thinking, um, breakdown of shared truth, you know, the film is very specific, I think, about the harms that, now, maybe if you're pointing to, you know, just chaos and on the streets of every major city in the world, you know, I understand if that's kind of

• 22:47Speaker 01

  what you're pointing to, but if you, if we use language to say, okay, which, which claims is the film actually making? And for each one of them, we can find clear evidence of an asymmetric responsibility. Um, I'll give you a clear example. In Facebook's own, um, leaked, uh, documents from that Wall Street Journal piece, this has now become a famous stat, they found that 64% of the extremist groups that people joined were due to Facebook's own recommendation system. In other words, you know, um, I don't know if you know this, but back in 2018, you know, they changed their mission statement from making the world open, more open and connected...

• 23:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, yeah. I've been covering them, you know, so this is definitely, but sorry, go ahead.

• 23:27Speaker 01

  No, no, yeah, sorry. I didn't mean that in a... Yeah, so, you know, as... So they changed their... For listeners who don't know, the, you know, they changed their business mission to bringing the world closer together. And the way they're going to do that with Facebook Groups, and we said this in our 2019 SFJazz presentation that's in the film, that they said, "So what did we do? We built an AI that would recommend groups for people to join." And then Zuckerberg claims in this blog post that, "And it works!" exclamation point. You know, "We were able to get people to join 50% more groups than they would have if we hadn't built this AI to recommend them." And Renee DiResta, one of our colleagues who's in the film and studies, you know, Russian disinformation and some conspiracy groups, she talks about her own experience

• 24:08Speaker 01

  as a mom, where she had joined a make-your-own-baby-food group on Facebook, so organic, do-it-yourself baby food. And you can imagine what was the most recommended Facebook group to her when she joined that group. Those anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, which is another kind of related, you know, do-it-yourself, you know, medicine-type approach to being a mother. But then, of course, once you join those groups, it recommended Pizzagate, Flat Earth, Chemtrails, et cetera. And there you have that stat that 64% of the extremist groups that people joined were due to Facebook's own recommendation systems. In the case of YouTube, we know that of the billion hours that are watched daily, 70% of, at least, by the way, this stat is two years old, because I think they've stopped wanting

• 24:50Speaker 01

  to brag about how good their recommendation system is after this pushback. But they briefly claimed that more than 70% of all the watch time, so 700 million hours after... About a... Excuse me, 700 million hours out of that billion hours is due to the YouTube recommendation system. And we know that they recommended Flat Earth videos hundreds of millions of times. They recommended Alex Jones' Infowars conspiracy theory videos 15 billion times. So that's more than the combined traffic of, you know, The Washington Post, BBC, Guardian, Fox News combined. So if you make a list of these claims on addiction, loneliness, mental health, conspiracy thinking, there's clear evidence for each one of those claims specifically.

• 25:30Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. But, okay, I'm gonna just go back to the main question, which is, is social media mostly responsible for this? Is it one factor of many? Like, why don't you give us your personal opinion in terms of how you would contextualize its responsibility here?

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's take a look at conspiracy thinking. And before I say this, I want to mention that COINTELPRO, MKUltra, these are real conspiracy theories. So I don't want to say, or rather, these are real, these are real things. So if I use the phrase conspiracy, we also know the CIA created the term conspiracy theory to sort of dismiss things that might have been legitimate. So I want to make sure that we're all self-aware. This is not meant to vilify any question of the establishment narrative. But if you were to ask, okay, so we have, you know, a third of the Republican Party inside of the QAnon movement. We've got people, we've got Flat Earth conferences that are very well-attended. We've got, you know, more 5G coronavirus, Bill Gates, satanic cult conspiracy theory stuff than we've ever had before.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  I think we've seen a rise of this thinking in the last two to three years than we've ever seen in modern, you know, in the last 30 years, I would at least say. I've studied cults earlier in my career, so I'm very familiar with the kind of dynamics of group think and, you know, self-enclosed belief systems that, you know, ways that evidence is used to even, you know, further justify that we were right. Leon Festinger's work on why when prophecies fail, that, you know, when I say that the world's going to end at May 22nd at 2:00 AM because the stars are aligning this way or that way, and then what happens when it doesn't happen that way? We just re-justify and double down and say, we got the math wrong. It's the same formula, but we were using the BC calendar instead of the AD calendar

• 27:14Speaker 01

  or whatever you want to say here. So, you know, when you think about conspiracy thinking and you have Facebook doing these group recommendations, each of those groups are a self-enclosed echo chamber. And we know that, from Facebook's own research, that if more than 50% of their recommendations came from them, as opposed to users going around and searching for groups to join, we have clear responsibility that that was on the side of Facebook. We know from the research that the best predictor of whether you'll believe in a new conspiracy theory is whether you already believe in one. That's the best predictor of whether you believe in a new conspiracy theory is whether you already believe in one. So if you daisy-chain these facts together, they add up to a world where it makes sense that we're all more paranoid.

• 27:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, so I think what you're saying is that it is the the main factor here, social media.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I mean, I'm not sure if I would say.

• 28:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Maybe I'm maybe I'm part of the problem, asking you to make a big statement like that. But I do want to get your thoughts. But sorry, go ahead.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I I probably phrase it a little bit more delicately, which is that I would say social media has been a dominant force in the rise of conspiracy oriented thinking and paranoia and distrust in the last five years. And we have to remember that we're actually about 10 years into these recommendation systems warping society. I think of YouTube, you know, if you remember in 2015, 2016, just how toxic YouTube used to feel, I don't know if you remember, the kind of background radiation of hate. We had a a former YouTube recommendations engineer, Guillaume Chaslot, who's in the film, who built a website called algo transparency.org. And he actually monitored what were the most common verbs that showed up in the right

• 28:53Speaker 01

  hand sidebar, meaning, you know, like, if you look at all the recommended videos across YouTube in English, you know, what words were used the most? And it was, I think the list was hates, obliterates, destroys, owns, you know, right? So it's like Jordan Peterson destroys social justice warrior in debate, right? And so this is the background radiation of hate that we were dosing our population with for, you know, again, more than 3 billion people. And and we were doing that for years. So I think we have to look at these consequences over time period.

• 29:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And and so how do you square that, like, calling it if it's not the the dump, the majority, the main factor, but is a dominant force? How do you square that with like some of the comments that you made in the film? For instance, one thing that struck me is when you said this is checkmate on humanity, tools to destabilize every country everywhere. Is that putting it in the proper context?

• 29:45Speaker 01

  Well, that quote, actually, that they use in the film, when I say it's checkmate on humanity, was in reference to a specific thing from that presentation that was not quite actually in the film. And what it had to do with was what we diagnose as we call it the inversion point. So previously, you know, people in AI futurism, you know, effective altruism circles, AI safety have all been worried about the singularity point, the point when technological intelligence or strength, sorry, when when AI outcompetes human intelligence and strengths, because that's when it takes our jobs and takes off and all of that. But we miss the much earlier point when technology undermines human weaknesses, which happens much earlier in that timeline.

• 30:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, that was in the movie. That was a new thought that was interesting to me. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then the checkmate point actually was following a different part of the presentation that was not there, which was actually around deep fakes and the ability to completely break the basis of what heuristics our minds use to know whether to trust information. So, you know, how do I know that you're trustworthy? Well, you know, maybe you squint your eyebrows in a trustworthy way. Maybe you use your voice in a trustworthy way. Maybe you have a Stanford shirt on that says you went to Stanford and I'm the kind of person who appeals to authority. So if you went to Stanford, clearly you must be smart or thoughtful or ethical. Whatever it is that we use as a basis to know whether something is trustworthy or not, that is being reduced into a simpler, simpler set of signals. On Twitter, it's how many followers do you have? Does it look like you're in Kansas?

• 31:14Speaker 01

  Does the tweet timeline look real? And does your photo look like it's authentic? That's a small number of discrete signals that are increasingly fakeable. And the checkmate humanity was the point that I could completely undermine your faith that something was either human generated or machine generated. And when that point gets crossed, there's a sort of checkmate on humanity. In addition to the fact that these systems have controlled our information environment and by doing that, they're kind of controlling human behavior. So there's a bigger point there, too.

• 31:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Are you upset that the film seemed to have take that line out of context then? If it was referring to something else? I mean, we talk a little bit about, you know, the way that these algorithms generate, you know, help prey on fear, for instance. And, you know, isn't that sort of a, I'm going to kick it to you, but isn't that sort of a case of, you know, the filmmakers doing some of the same stuff they're decrying?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, the films have to do editing to try to compress information down and they thought that that it was probably possible to make the point that it was checkmate humanity from, you know, because it's really an extension of the points that are already being made, that if you continue to undermine more and more and more of human weaknesses and to therefore take down and erode the kind of life support systems that make up a social fabric, you kind of get to checkmate humanity from there. And I think that's what they were probably referring to. But I take the point that, you know, the film has, you know, music that is maybe exaggerating or tone, you know, setting the tone.

• 32:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  I guess it's not just music on that front. It's the fact that like you're talking about deepfakes, which is a totally different technology from, you know, the social media algorithms and engagement machine and juxtapose that is, I feel like there should have been more, more context on that one. I mean, I'm glad we're discussing it, but I'm also sort of scratching my head to see why they would use that without the context that you just delivered.

• 33:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that may be fair. I mean, I think that the, the point, I mean, really, again, it's, it's through hacking more and more and more of human weaknesses has you arrive at that checkmate point. So, you know, the Marshall Islands of technology hacking human weaknesses was when it overloaded our short term memory. Seven plus or minus two things we can hold in short term working memory, as we know from cognitive science. And we feel that that was our first kind of felt sense of technology overriding human weaknesses. And we felt that as information overload or I have too many tabs open or what was I doing? I came here to open up that tab and now I can't remember why. Or I seem to say anything with email. And that was kind of the first point. And then you can map each of the other points of, you know, polarization, giving us our own filter bubble, changing

• 33:49Speaker 01

  human weaknesses on how we perceive other people's reality. These are all just on a continuity landscape of hacking more and more of human weaknesses until you arrive at checkmate. But maybe that wasn't, is clearly presented the film. So it's a fair, a fair critique.

• 34:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, totally. And look, I mean, I'm giving you a hard time here, but no one talked about this stuff. I mean, it was rarely talked about, I think, before you started speaking out about it. And it's not all going to be perfect. It's why I'm glad you're doing the work that you're, you're doing. And, and yeah, I think that, you know, there is, there are definitely, I think, fair critiques of the movie, but it's also good that we're having this discussion and I'm glad that the movie started this discussion and I'm glad you brought it up. So.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  And I think I agree with you. And I think also, you know, we encourage people after they watch the film to really educate themselves and go deeper. You know, on our, on our podcast, You're in Divided Attention, we, we interview many of the subjects who are in the film who go just into detail and it's not exaggerated at all. It's just an honest reflection of. You know what they found on Russian disinformation or YouTube recommendations?

• 34:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, no, I'm laughing because they did have the website up at the end of the movie, but before anyone could take it down, it already started auto playing the next thing, probably based off of an algorithmic recommendation. So

• 35:02Speaker 01

  And that's Netflix.

• 35:02Alex Kantrowitz?

  Get to that in the next segment because I do have some Netflix questions, but I found that fairly interesting. Okay, we will take a short break and be right back after this with Tristan Harris. This episode is brought to you by AVPoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now. Copilots, chatbots, agents doing real work. But here's the part nobody loves talking about. All that AI runs on your data and most teams have no single way to see it, secure it, and prove it's under control. That's exactly what AVPoint does. For 25 years, they've been the trusted layer beneath the world's most demanding data, now extended

• 35:41Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 36:24Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 37:06Alex Kantrowitz?

  Learn how to stop online threats before they become real world attacks. The link's in the show notes.

• 37:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here for the second half of our show, talking with Tristan Harris, one of the stars of the Social Dilemma movie, about the movie. And man, it's been a fun conversation so far. Tristan, I appreciate you being willing to come on here and really discuss the meat of the film and face some of the critiques head on. One question I have for you to start the second segment is like the question of personal responsibility. I mean, one of the questions I got on Twitter when I mentioned that I was gonna do this interview is people wanted me to ask you like whether you think people have, I mean, actually, I said, I want, what would you ask the people who made the movie and want to make sure people know that you were a character and it wasn't yours.

• 37:59Alex Kantrowitz?

  But, you know, one of the questions that came up was, do these people believe that, you know, the population has free will? And how much comes down to, how much of this comes down to, you know, the actions of the platforms versus how much of this comes down to the actions of the people? And what do you think about that? Is there some level of responsibility that we ourselves have? And can we blame, you know, all this stuff going on in our lives, on Facebook and on YouTube?

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, first, I want to be really clear again. I don't blame, you know, the consequences of my life or the entire world on Facebook or YouTube. I think where responsibility lies has to do with where there is asymmetric power. So if I have more than 50% influence over your actions, and, you know, you're choosing from menus that I am providing, and more and more of your choices, if I look at the surface area of choices that you make in your life, and what percentage of that surface area occurs on a smartphone, and from a handful of user interfaces that are designed by, you know, a handful of 21 to, you know, 40-year-olds in California, who are mostly in the Bay Area, well, that number, whatever that percentage is, has been going up over time by a lot, right?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  And one of the things, as we talked about in the film, my background as a kid was in magic, and... What astonishes me in magic is how many people think that they make genuinely free choices when magicians constantly are manipulating the basis of those choices. I mean, the simplest thing is by controlling the menu, you control the outcome, right? So, you know, and in the field of rhetoric, we know from Bertrand Russell, Russell conjugation, that you can conjugate the emotional feeling you want someone to have about something before they hear it. So you can say, well, embattled, the embattled leader, you know, or strong, the embattled leader of that company, I'm trying to think of an example, I don't know who was the embattled leader, Travis Kalanick, right, from Uber.

• 39:57Speaker 01

  So you could say, embattled CEO Travis Kalanick, and I've told you how I want you to feel about Travis before you even think for yourself, well, do I feel good about Travis? Do I feel bad about Travis? In general, you know, our choices, our thinking, our feeling are being pre-conjugated by interfaces that we don't see or control always. The work of George Lakoff is really good on this in terms of language. In magic, and in general in design, we use the phrase choice architecture, that we live inside of a choice architecture and a menu. And in that choice architecture, we're making and privileging certain features of choices, like, you know, when I buy that food at Starbucks, does it show me, does it privilege the price of that food with a dollar sign, or does it privilege the calorie count, you know?

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And that would shift the basis of the choices that I would make, to be privileging one piece of information over another. If I change the social psychology, where everyone's rushing to get the illuminated, you know, in a shiny sign, you know, McMuffin sandwich, because everyone else is going for it, or maybe that's not the best example, but using social proof by saying, you know, 3,400 other two people like this post, don't you also want to like it? This also influences our psychology. In fact, social, you know, proof is one of the most powerful ways of making us seem that something is legitimate. I mean, take conspiracy theories, you know, if everyone's believing it, then how can it be false? If a majority of people believe it, usually if a majority believe it, that would mean that it must be true.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  But if you think of I'm a deceptive actor, it's not very hard for me to slowly grow a population to get more. More than 50% of people to believe in something. So we don't like to admit to ourselves the extent to which our sense making and choice making are driven by factors in our environment and are outside of our control. And the degree to which we are not aware of those things is the degree to which we are controlled. Meaning if I know about social proof, and then when I see that 3,000 other people like it, or the majority of people believe it. And if I say to myself, well, I'm going to ask what, on what basis would I know that that was true? That's one, you know, micro degree of free will, because I've created an awareness about one of the things that would otherwise have me turn into an automatic believing machine. So that's a big, complex answer, but I think that when you ask about free will,

• 42:09Speaker 01

  you know, the, the level of asymmetry between people who are designing technology and structuring the choices and the features and the colors and the notifications and the appearance of news feeds and the fact that news feeds don't show you if an article that was posted was five years old versus it was yesterday, allowing people to not post fake news, but fake, fake recent news. It was not actually recent. Those are all decisions made by designers in California and have big consequences.

• 42:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, I remember like the opening scene is you sitting down and immediately checking your phone as you go.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 42:44Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're aware of this stuff and you can't help it.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  This, this is actually really important for people to get. No one should feel bad when we're using technology and feel like we got sucked in or, you know, I have been studying these things for, for such a long time. And, you know, do you think that it, you know, I'm immune? Do I think that I'm immune when, you know, I post something about the social dilemma and I get lots of likes versus a bunch of angry comments? I mean, social approval is one of the things we're most evolved to care about. And, you know, if 99 comments on a post are positive and one is negative, you know, which, which does our mind, which? Yeah, our mind, what does our mind remember the 99 or does it, does it loop and loop and loop on the negative, right? In general, we're evolved to look on the negative because

• 43:31Speaker 01

  that's where it's helpful for us evolutionarily. But with social media, it's never been easier to see a tree of people who don't like you. Or if you're black or LGBTQ, people who are more harassed and discriminated against on social media, you have infinite hate trails that you can keep clicking on through the tree for hours. You know, there's, there's so much vitriol that is so easy to, to take, take us over that I think, you know, we have to be aware.

• 44:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, there's the vitriol and then there's also just sort of the connection to other people. Like I knew what, I mean, I cover social media for a living. And I knew what the deal was when I'm sitting down and watch the movie. I feel like I probably picked my phone up like 60 times in the middle of that movie and probably couldn't make it through, you know, 10 minutes straight because my brain is so fried by it. I want to, we can talk about this for hours. I know we only have another few minutes. And now I have some like nitty gritty questions to ask you. So talking about the, the way that platforms are structured, how much of this do you think is algorithms? And how much of do you, you know, one thing the film didn't discuss is the share button and the retweet button. And I've covered it. And I think they have a profound effect in terms of the type of information

• 44:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  we share and the type of information that populates these platforms because people write for retweets and shares. So I'm kind of dubious that it's the algorithms. And I think that the share and the retweet are much worse, but I never hear about them. So what's your take on that?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, it's, it's interesting because in my mind, the film, the film does include that. But, but maybe it's, it's not as, as evident. Yeah.

• 45:07Alex Kantrowitz?

  I guess I would like, I would like this sort of, sorry, this is again, me like saying, what I would like in the movie, which I know is annoying, but like, there, there's this, there's a real clear issue with the fact that when we, when we don't think before we share, we'll pass along stuff, you know, that's fake or sensationalized or can, you know, confirms our emotions without a second thought. But whereas we pause, when we pause to think, we are often much less susceptible, even Twitter's running this experiment right now, making people click before they retweet something or asking them if they want to. And they have that shown to, to, you know, improve the information ecosystem on the platform. I just wish that that was foregrounded a little bit and foregrounded more in this discussion versus algorithms and engagement, which I think is totally different.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think the reason that my mind includes the share button in this is that those algorithms wouldn't work if people weren't hitting share buttons and retweet buttons and so that include them in the premise. But I understand what you're saying and you know, the example of what Twitter is doing with showing you a prompt saying, have you read this before you share it? I mean, these were things that were being advocated for five or six years ago, frankly, among people in our community. So it's taken a long time to get some, you know, some of these things in. I would use the metaphors of epidemiology. You know, I think what's interesting about the coronavirus is it has imbued the culture with a new kind of way of understanding the world in terms of infection, right? And in terms of super spreaders, in terms of shedding, you know, who is an asymptomatic

• 46:37Speaker 01

  carrier and who's asymptomatic carrier? So each of us are spreading information and infecting others with beliefs and biases. And some of us are super spreaders. Some of us are shedding biases whenever we like things and retweet things, right? We're shedding biases for how other people should see things. And some of us are doing that symptomatically, like we are very obviously polluting the information environment. Some of us are doing that more asymptomatic by maybe boosting things in sort of subtle ways by clicking on them. And the fact that we click on them is actually making the algorithm upregulate them to other people, even though we don't explicitly share. So I think when you think about it that way, the share button and those pauses are kind

• 47:19Speaker 01

  of like loading vitamin C into each carrier and saying, you know, maybe we are gonna put a mask on and so we're not gonna share everything to everyone else. That's what that share interstitial is on Twitter.

• 47:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  But is it like more profound than that? Because you know, one of the things that people have talked about when you look at algorithms especially is what do you make of the fact that like some of these same problems occur on WhatsApp? Like WhatsApp has the forward, but it doesn't have ads and it doesn't have an algorithm that shows you stuff and you still see people spreading conspiracy theories and WhatsApp isn't dependent on the time that you spent there. So isn't that like a fairly compelling counterargument to the one that you're advancing?

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Well, so WhatsApp's business model is still dependent on its parent company, which is based on an engagement-driven model. That's why the VP of Growth at Facebook, Chamath, says, you know, how did we make these things work? You know, we hack into human vulnerabilities. WhatsApp's done it. LinkedIn has done it. Facebook has done it. You know, he uses that line and he includes WhatsApp because it is hacking that same thing. It is delivering reasons, excuses, for you to go back and check messages. It is creating social signals for us to respond to. It makes us feel guilty when we don't respond to them, whether that's feel guilty that we didn't like our partner's post back or feel guilty that we didn't respond to that message, using read receipts so that now you know that I saw that message and it was a big message from you that talked about maybe your house burning down

• 48:46Speaker 01

  or something like that. And if I don't respond to that, now I feel really guilty. This is all tapping into really deep human psychology and vulnerability. So it actually is driven by that same business model, just not explicitly advertisement-based. I mean, WhatsApp is essentially an advertising-based business model. It's just not happening on WhatsApp. It's happening on the other platforms that subsidize it.

• 49:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  So is the idea that basically it's driving all these engagement methods so that you end up going to like Facebook and Instagram? Like basically, or?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think-

• 49:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, there's no ads there. So it's sort of interesting that some of the same stuff is happening.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, if it, that's why the ads themselves, the rectangles of the advertisements are not what the critique of the film is about. It's about a business model that is dependent upon the zombie-ification of human beings, domesticating people into, you know, addicted, distracted, outraged, polarized and disinformed humans writ large. And that business model powering WhatsApp still has benefits to turning us into addicted, distracted, responsive human beings. And so again, if we want a society that's addicted, distracted and hyper-responsive to others, then maybe that business model is aligned with the social fabric. But in general, these things weren't designed, you know, by social theorists who say, well, what makes a healthy social fabric? Or weren't designed by child psychologists to say,

• 50:06Speaker 01

  what's good for children? They were just designed based on, hey, did we get a flywheel turning and get engagement and growth going up into the right?

• 50:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, totally. And it's been interesting, you know, being in the valley for a while and seeing the way that executives, and this might have been in the film too, but the way that executives hand this stuff to their kids and the caution that they take, whereas like, none of this stuff comes with a user manual to anybody when it comes out of the box.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I think the point there to make is, you know, would you trust a doctor if you say, well, would you get this surgery for yourself or for your own kids? And they'd say, hell, no. You know, would you take their advice? You know, if you still lawyer and say, hey, you know, would you argue the case this way if it were your own children? And they say, oh, my God, I would never do that. And you say, well, why would you give that advice to me? The CEO of Lunchables Foods didn't give his own kids Lunchables. I think that's all you need to know if you're a parent. And I think one of the basic principles of ethics is the ethics of symmetry, doing on to others as we would do to ourselves, or even doing to the most vulnerable of our own children. And if we lived by that ethical protocol, I'm sure we would live in a much healthier, better society. And that would be the unit test of if we had made humane technology for kids is that technology that that technology

• 51:13Speaker 01

  was used, parents in the tech industry were giving it to their own children and didn't feel bad about it.

• 51:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. Netflix. Why Netflix? I mean, Netflix is sort of ground zero for all those problems, right? It's, it says it's competing against sleep. And like I said, it gives you the recommendation algorithm to to make sure that you're watching the next thing, sort of exactly the problem. So, and you guys, I mean, you guys also created, I read the film created accounts, I think on Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. So like, is this, I mean, what's going on there?

• 51:47Speaker 01

  I hear you asking multiple questions. And one is about the hypocrisy of starting social accounts on the very services that you're criticizing. And that critique is easily answered by, yeah, I mean, that critique is easily answered by the fact that if you want to change. The public perception and create the only thing that will actually change these systems, which is government regulation through a massive cultural movement of shared understanding about the problem, kind of the climate change of culture. How are you going to reach millions of people except through one of these limited platforms, whether it's YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, et cetera? So I think the fact that we have to use these platforms to try to critique them and to

• 52:29Speaker 01

  build support for changing them speaks to their monopoly power. And the fact that it would be seen as hypocritical actually, actually empowers the antitrust arguments that are proceeding right now on Capitol Hill. So I think it's the fact that we don't have another place to go, the fact that children who want to opt out of Instagram don't have another place to go but another addictive, manipulative system of TikTok. You know, this, this is kind of speaks to the problem. So we actually use that as further ammunition of that is exactly right. That's what the problem is here. Now, in terms of, you know, why would the film, you know, Netflix, you know, the film is launching on Netflix? I think one thing that gets confused about these platforms is the belief that, you know, Netflix is a video site, so therefore it's only competing with other video sites like

• 53:14Speaker 01

  YouTube or back in the day, Facebook, you know, in 2009 was only competing against other social networks like Twitter. And I remember there was this day, I was at a cafe in San Francisco, Samovar Tea Lounge. And I was talking with a friend who was, you know, deep in the growth team at Facebook. And by the way, I mean, that's where this work comes from because I know so many people who've told me these decisions over and over and over again, kind of what the calculus was. And he said to me, you know, people think that our biggest competitor at Facebook is Twitter or is one of these other social networks or MySpace or something might have been. But actually, our biggest competitor is probably YouTube because they're not competing for social networks. They're competing for time spent.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  And so it doesn't really matter whether it's Netflix or YouTube or whatever. Everyone is competing in a finite attention economy. And that's, that's the problem we have to face is that because it is a commons, it is an attention commons, it is a consciousness commons. We are all sharing one airspace of, you know, finite amount of attention. And, you know, much like in the climate movement, there's something called Earth overshoot day, where like it's the, the day in a year that we have overshoot, ever overshot the earth's resources, surpassed the replenishment, the replenishment rate. And that day moves earlier and earlier because we keep consuming way more beyond our means. When it with an infinite growth based economy. The same thing is true for the attention economy.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  We have a shared commons and we are overshooting the limited capacity of attention that we have as a culture with essentially trivia. And this is where I think Aldous Huxley's book Brave New World or, you know, Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death is really about, you know, that instead of this Huck, this, this Orwellian dystopia of censorship and Big Brother and surveillance, we have this other dystopia of the Huxleyan dystopia of Brave New World, where we give people so much amusement that they amuse themselves to death. We give people so much trivia and trivialities and egoism and passivity that we kind of devolve not through restricting ourselves, but by overwhelming us with our vices. And I think that's the dystopia that we're actually living in strangely simultaneous

• 55:19Speaker 01

  with a kind of Orwellian surveillance or utopia. So we've kind of gotten both. And I think that's what we have to fundamentally change is have a more healthy and humane attention economy that respects the finite commons that we have to share for airspace and have it reflect the things that we would want our common attention landscape to, to reflect.

• 55:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, and you mentioned government regulation. That's kind of tricky today, given the fact that the Trump administration and the Department of Justice, which is politically motivated, is the one that's pushing it now. That's something I would love to talk to you about on a further episode. Maybe we'll have you back when Google's going through its DOJ. Investigate, well, it's not even investigation. It's going to be in action. We just don't know exactly what the outline is yet. But that's coming up. I'd love to have you back on to talk about it. Meanwhile, for listeners out there, I will tease it. We have Ben Smith from the New York Times coming on next week. And he and I go a little bit into depth about what it means for the fact that we're now having these platforms being investigated by governments

• 56:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  that actually want to move them one way or the other politically, and how that's going to play out over time. But for now, I want to say thanks to everyone for listening. And thank you, Tristan, for coming on and dealing with all these questions. It's not easy. And I appreciate you having a moment to come on and speak with me about this.

• 56:42Speaker 01

  It's really great discussion, Alex. I really want to say I appreciate all of the critical questions that everyone's exercising here, because this is not about creating a moral panic. It's about really understanding the kind of geometry of a very specific threat that's a big deal. So thank you for asking and really excited to come back another time and talk about maybe some of the other aspects.

• 57:04Alex Kantrowitz?

  Totally, yeah. And I definitely appreciate the work that you're doing. Keep on doing it. I don't think any activism was going to be perfect. But you're speaking up about something that I think we need to have a conversation about. So I think that's good. I think it's good.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Definitely. Thanks.

• 57:22Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, everyone, appreciate you listening. If you are new to the podcast, feel free to hit subscribe. We have episodes every Wednesday. We'll be back next Wednesday with Ben Smith from the New York Times, as I mentioned. And if you're a repeat listener and are enjoying what you're listening to, if you could hit a rating on your podcast app of choice, that would help us with discoverability. Juice those algorithms, make sure we get in front of more people. Play the game, and then we can critique it some more. All right, thanks, everyone. We will see you next Wednesday.

• 58:01Speaker 02

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• 58:30Speaker 03

  In this life, you can't win.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  When the world gets you down.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  No!

• 58:34Speaker 04

  Escape to Pluto TV.

• 58:36Speaker 03

  This is objectively fantastic.

• 58:38Speaker 04

  Relax into the movies and shows you already know and love, all for free.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Schwing!

• 58:42Speaker 04

  Even our news is uplifting.

• 58:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  You stay classy, San Diego.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  Watch School of Rock, Crazy Ex Girlfriend, Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, The X-Files, Wayne's World, and so much more.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  We're not worthy!

• 58:53Speaker 04

  The best things on TV really are free. You just have to know where to look. Escape to Pluto TV. Stream now, pay never.