Why Everything We Do Matters & The Importance of Big Tech Oversight - SYSK Choice

Human touch feels good — but it may also do far more than we realize. From a reassuring hand on the shoulder to a long hug or massage, deliberate touch can trigger measurable biological responses in the body. This episode begins with what science reveals about why touch matters and what happens when we don’t get enough of it. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/everyone-top/202108/the-vital-importance-human-touch It’s easy to assume that the big moments shape our lives — but what if tiny, seemingly meaningless choices matter just as much, or even more? A few minutes, a small decision, or a random event can quietly ripple outward in ways we never see. Brian Klaas joins me to explain how chance, chaos, and randomness shape our lives — and how understanding this can actually help you make better choices. Brian is an associate professor in global politics at University College London, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and author of Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (https://amzn.to/3SrRj31). “Big Tech” companies influence how we communicate, shop, work, and even think — yet they operate with surprisingly little oversight. Who should be setting the rules for companies with that much power? And what happens if no one does? Tom Wheeler explains why tech regulation matters, what’s at stake, and who should be in charge. Tom served as Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration and is author of Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age? (https://amzn.to/47OunPU). And finally, could what kids eat affect their risk of asthma, eczema, or other allergic conditions? Research suggests a link between fast food consumption and respiratory allergies. We wrap up with what scientists have found and why it matters. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scitranslmed.3005803 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 0:30Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, being touched or massaged feels good, but does it have real benefits? Then, the tiniest, flukiest events can drastically alter the course of your life, and that can be a good thing.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  I understand that the world is constantly in flux, that there are small things that can make a big difference and so on. Maybe I'll experiment 5% to 15% more in my life. There's a lot of studies that show that this makes happier people, and also it makes for more resilient solutions.

• 0:58Mike Carruthers?

  Also, can fast food cause allergies? And big tech, they collect a lot of information about you, and some important people are demanding change.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  What about if we just collected the information that's necessary to conduct the transaction? That doesn't include your location and the last eight sites that you went to, but that's what gets collected?

• 1:24Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 1:43Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. I think most listeners know this, but in case you're not aware, we publish three episodes a week, Monday, Thursday, and Saturday. And they are published in the middle of the night, so when you wake up in the morning, they're right there. I mention it only because I would hate for you to miss an episode. Monday, Thursday, and Saturday.

• 2:08Mike Carruthers?

  First up today, we all know that being touched can feel good. But does touch have an actual biological effect? Well, it sure seems to. Research on the effects of massage show that massage has a positive impact on anxiety and depression. But what about simple supportive touch between friends and family? Yes, that seems to help, too. Studies, including one done at Brigham Young University, have shown that touch calms our nervous center and slows down our heartbeat. Human touch also lowers blood pressure as well as cortisol, our stress hormone. It also triggers the release of oxytocin, a hormone known for promoting emotional bonding with other people.

• 2:53Mike Carruthers?

  Studies using brain scans have found that the brain quiets down in response to stress when a person's hand is held. The effect is greatest when the hand is being held by a loved one, but it still works even with a stranger. It is hard to argue with the positive power of human touch, and that is something you should know.

• 3:18Mike Carruthers?

  So there is this idea that everything can affect anything, and anything can affect everything. And ultimately, how your life goes is not as much in your control as you might like to think. Whether you eat cereal or an egg for breakfast could drastically change the outcome of your life. I don't know how, but it could. If you stayed in bed five minutes longer, your life could be very different than if you hadn't. If you put your left sock on before your right sock, that could change everything. There's a lot more to this, and here to explain it a lot better than me is Brian Klaas.

• 3:59Mike Carruthers?

  Brian is an associate professor in global politics at University College in London, a contributing writer for The Atlantic, and author of the book Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. Hey, Brian, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me on the show. So explain what I started talking about here, how everything can affect everything.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think when a lot of people think about sort of thought experiments like science fiction with time travel, for example, they totally intuitively get this. So whether it's Back to the Future or a story about someone going back a million years in history, the warning is basically not to change anything, right? Don't step on the wrong bug a million years ago because you might end up deleting humans. Or, you know, don't talk to someone in the generation of your parents because you might end up making yourself not exist. And then when we get to the present, we don't think like this, right? But the way that change happens is identical in the past and in the present. And so the point that I'm making is that small adjustments in our lives, in our societies and so on, can have really profound effects.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  And the origin story of this book, to a certain extent, was me finding out, it's this story from 1905 in a little farmhouse in Wisconsin, where this woman, a tragic story, she had four young children and she has a mental breakdown and kills her four children and then kills herself. And her husband comes home and finds this whole family dead. This is my great-grandfather's first wife. And, you know, he remarried to my great-grandmother. And quite literally, if she hadn't done that, I wouldn't exist and you wouldn't be listening to my voice. And so when you start to think about those ripple effects through time and space and so on, I think there's quite a profound implication about the importance of even small actions

• 5:48Speaker 02

  changing the future.

• 5:49Mike Carruthers?

  Okay. And I think people have heard, you know, if a butterfly flaps its wings a certain way at a certain time, it could cause a hurricane halfway around the world. And in your case, I mean, if your great-grandfather's first wife hadn't killed her whole family, you wouldn't be here. But something else might have happened that was good and you wouldn't be here to see it. But you don't know what would happen. You don't know if it would be good or bad. So what do we do with this? Is there anything other than observing this that we can take away?

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a few things. So the butterfly effect is a subset of chaos theory. And we just basically don't, we basically ignore chaos theory when we think about change in our own lives or in our own societies. I think it's a mistake. When we tend to think about the way the world works, we tend to ascribe, and this is part of a bias that we have in how we think about things, we tend to ascribe straightforward reasons, right? I mean, economics runs on models which say, here's how the world works. You know, when we sort of look back at our life stories, we have a sort of narrative that we have about why things happened. If you accept that there's a lot more chance, a lot more chaos involved, then there's a few implications for how you should live slightly differently. The first one is that you should experiment more, because if you're

• 7:09Speaker 02

  certain about things, then you optimize. But if you're uncertain, then you experiment. And there's a lot of evidence that shows that experimentation in the face of uncertainty is much better for us. It also helps us solve problems in our societies as well. And additionally, on top of that, I think it also is something where you can have a philosophical shift from a worldview in which lots of people sort of obsess about control, to one where you give up control but accept influence. And I think that's the lesson of chaos theory taken seriously, is that everything we do has a ripple effect. We might not know what it is, but it means that, you know, we should think about our lives as meaningful, even on the small stuff. Because, you know, the sort of mentality

• 7:53Speaker 02

  of the squished bug, or, you know, the conversation that shifts history, this sort of stuff, it's not some parlor game. It's the way that reality actually functions. And I think it's a very empowering thought to internalize when we think about our daily life.

• 8:07Mike Carruthers?

  Well, one of the, one of the things I've always noticed is how people, you know, look at their life and look at particularly their career as something that they do, that it's their responsibility to do. But yet, when you look back on your life and your career, you see that so much of what happened is not what you did, but who you met and when you met them, and opportunities that presented themselves because you were in this place. It had nothing to, well, it had something to do, but it didn't have as much to do with your grit and determination to get up in the morning and advance your career. It was just chance.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so I think this is definitely true. There's a huge amount of things around success that are out of our control. Right? I didn't choose who my parents were. I didn't choose where I was born. I didn't choose when I was born. All those things had a profound effect on the trajectory of my life. But what you're referring to, I think, is a really important idea, which is that when we look back, we have these sort of building blocks where we sort of had a plan and then things happened, right? And they diverted our plan. But on top of that, there's a lot of things that happen that you're totally, totally blind to. There is a film from the 1990s called Sliding Doors, which is starring Gwyneth Paltrow. And it's got this, basically, two versions of this woman's life. One in which she makes the tube train, the subway train, and one in which she misses it. And she has no idea.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  It's a split second, basically, that shifts her life. And her world turns out radically differently. And I think this idea is really important, that it's not just that our trajectories through careers and families and who we meet and who we spend our lives with and so on can be swayed by little tiny changes. It's also that there's all these invisible pivots that we're totally oblivious to, right? Those sliding doors moments. Or for me, you know, I didn't know about this mass murder that ended up producing my existence until I was in my mid twenties. I mean, I was totally blind to this. And it's obviously a very important part of my origin story, but I was ignorant of it. How many other things am I ignorant of about the pathway of my life? I mean, it's an infinite number. So I think that gives you a healthy appreciation for it.

• 10:18Speaker 02

  And it also makes you less likely to fully blame yourself when you fail and more likely to not fully take credit when you succeed, which I think are important ideas because we are in this sort of interconnected world where we only have so much control. And yet, I think a lot of the messages we get are that, oh, if you fail, it's because you screwed up 100% of the time. And if you succeed, it's because you were brilliant 100% of the time. A world driven by chance and chaos allows for a lot less of that straight black and white mentality.

• 10:49Mike Carruthers?

  But it also is disempowering, I think, in one way because, like, for example, that, you know, if you miss the train, it could change your life forever. But if you got the train, the train could have crashed and killed you. So, I mean, there's no way to know what's better before it happens. So it's, chance is chance. That's why they call it chance. So you kind of just have to roll the dice and go with whatever happens.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that's true to a certain extent, but the experimentation point I made before, I'll elaborate on a little bit more. So there was a brilliant study by some economists where they looked at a strike that was carried out in the London Tube network, the London subway. And basically, it forced all these commuters to end up taking a totally different pathway to work, a different commute, right? When they looked at the anonymized cellphone data of their pathways to work, they found that 5% of the people permanently shifted to the new route, right? Now, they had thought that they were on the optimum, the optimal path, the optimal commute, right? And then they were forced out of it and forced to experiment, and they found a better pathway. And I think this is again where that sort of mentality

• 12:01Speaker 02

  shift of thinking that you have control, thinking that you can therefore optimize, thinking that you know all the answers and so on. When you start to appreciate the uncertainty and the chance and these sorts of aspects in your life, you play with uncertainty in a way that is, I think, experimentally very, very helpful to you. And it provides different ideas, which is, you know, it's basically how evolution works, too. It's sort of the sort of evolutionary theory is all about experimentation and mutations happening and so on, solving problems. So you're right. I mean, I cannot tell you whether, you know, the snooze button or the sock or whatever it is, the train that you miss is going to produce a better or worse life. I think it's just important for us not to live the lie that these things are meaningless. And I think most of us sort of go through the world

• 12:46Speaker 02

  imagining that this stuff just gets washed out in the end. And I don't think it does. I think that's an important thing to recognize.

• 12:53Mike Carruthers?

  Well, but it may not be meaningless, but in many of these cases, you are powerless. That whether, if you miss the train, you miss the train, and it wasn't intentional, and you miss the train, or you put your left sock on, that you're powerless to do anything with that prior to doing anything with that.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Well, I would disagree with the idea that you're powerless. I would say that you don't have good information about what's going to happen. Right? And I think there's a lot of examples of this where a woman who's going to a conference in New York City gives a tie as a gift to her coworker. And he decides to go back to his hotel room to change and put the new tie on to show his appreciation because it clashes with his old shirt or whatever. And she goes up to the conference and it turns out to be on the 101st floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11 and she dies and he survives. Right? Now, this is a random act of kindness that ultimately causes her own death and saves the life of a coworker. She could never foresee that. Right? But I think that there's a lot of stuff when we think about, you know, you look at politics, you look at economics, you look at, anytime you turn on the TV and people are explaining

• 13:58Speaker 02

  why things happen, they're explaining them with these really neat and tidy models. There's like five variables. Or you get a self-help book and it says, if you just do these three things, your life will be better. I don't think that's true. I think it's a lie. And I think it's important for us to recognize that because it makes us smarter when we are making decisions in the face of uncertainty, to not just simply, you know, regurgitate this simplified model, a fake version of reality in which we can control everything. And instead, you know, we influence everything and we control nothing. I think it's a very important but nuanced shift in the way we see the world.

• 14:32Mike Carruthers?

  We are talking about the chaos of life and how anything can affect almost anything. And my guest is Dr. Brian Klaas. He is author of the book Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. So Brian, there's a saying that everything happens for a reason. So help reconcile that saying with what you're talking about, about fluke and chaos.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  I personally don't believe everything happens for a reason. I think that if you're a believer, that might make sense, right? So if you have a sort of mentality that God is in control and so on, then I can understand the nature of that viewpoint. But there's a lot of stuff scientifically that we look at. I mean, the asteroid that hit the dinosaurs and made them extinct. If that had been delayed by a second, the dinosaurs likely would not have gone extinct, mammals would not have risen, and it's unlikely humans would exist, right? And the best scientific evidence suggests that that asteroid was caused by a brief oscillation in a place called the Oort Cloud in the distant reaches of space. And that's, you know, it's an idea called contingency, where if this one thing had been different, everything would be different. And I think when you look back at the history of how humans emerged, for example,

• 15:44Speaker 02

  or how our lives are built, it's just contingency upon contingency upon contingency. Now, our brains have evolved to see reasons behind everything. And that's because it helps us survive, right? When you were in the hunter-gatherer society or, you know, the long stretch of humanity, if you see, you know, or hear a rustling of the grass, it makes sense for you to infer that there might be a saber-toothed tiger there. And if you are wrong and there's nothing there, that doesn't kill you. But if you ignore the rustling in the grass and think, oh, that's unrelated to anything else, and the saber-toothed tiger is there, it will eat you. So we've evolved through survivorship of, you know, basically people who find patterns. And when you find patterns, it helps you survive. So our brains are fine-tuned to see explanations for everything.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  We're allergic to explanations of randomness or small changes having big effects. And this is where, again, I think the cognitive bias we have is important to recognize because we can counteract it. We can understand that actually sometimes there are random things that happen. Sometimes small changes do have big effects.

• 16:46Mike Carruthers?

  There is a big business today in predictions, forecasting the future, predicting what the economy is going to do, what politics is going to do. We see these people making predictions on TV all the time, and they're almost always wrong. And yet they keep coming back, and people seem to like to hear these predictions. But what you're talking about shows that you can't predict much of anything because you don't know what else is going to affect it, that your prediction might work in a vacuum, but it's not in a vacuum.

• 17:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I describe myself as a disillusioned social scientist because I am a social scientist. I do study this stuff. I do try to think about how the world works. I mean, the history of the 21st century is a history of models and predictions being upended by fluky events, right? I mean, every geopolitical forecast was invalidated by 9/11. Every financial and economic forecast was invalidated by the financial crisis. Every, you know, regional geopolitical forecast in the Arab Spring, a guy lights himself on fire in Tunisia and it causes the collapse of multiple regimes and multiple civil wars. You have the rise of Trump and Brexit. These are, you know, massive black swan events. And then you also have the pandemic, which, you know, there's, there's still debate about the origin story of it, but no matter how it happened, whether it escaped from

• 18:05Speaker 02

  a lab or whether it came from an animal, it was one person in Wuhan, China, getting infected by a single mutated virus, and it changed the lives of 8 billion people for several years and also upended all the geopolitical and economic forecasts. So, you know, I think, I think one of the things that I grapple with is why, why don't we internalize the lesson that we have less control than, than we do? I mean, you're right, like, we, we keep making predictions. And I, I go on TV sometimes to talk about politics and what I'm aware of is that, you know, when you get asked a question, you can't say, I don't know. And you can't say, well, maybe it was just sort of a random accident. Because the, the way that you're expected to describe the world is a straightforward A to B line

• 18:49Speaker 02

  with only a few very obvious variables and they account for everything.

• 18:54Mike Carruthers?

  You had mentioned earlier in our discussion about the importance of experimentation in life. Can you go a little deeper into that?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  One of my favorite stories about this is a story of forced experimentation, where we're sort of forced out of our comfort zones and forced to deal with uncertainty. And so Keith Jarrett, this great jazz pianist, shows up to the Cologne Opera House at one point for this big packed event. And they've screwed up and they haven't gotten him his exact specification grand piano. All they have is this really, really rickety awful piano that's supposed to only be used for practice. And there's no time to fix it, right? So what happens is he has to experiment with the instrument and sort of play with it and adapt himself to it and, and sort of just deal with the uncertainty. And that recording of that concert is the number one selling jazz album of all time.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  It is apparently one of the best pieces of jazz music, according to critics, that has ever been produced. And it was produced by this accident and then experimentation, right? And I think, to me, this is one of the big takeaways that people can use in their own lives, is to think, okay, if I have the hubris to believe that I understand and can control the world, then I won't ever try new things, right? But if I understand that the world is constantly in flux, that there are small things that can make a big difference and so on, maybe I'll experiment five to 15% more in my life. There's a lot of studies that show that this makes happier people, and it also is a lot, there are a lot of studies that also shows it makes for more resilient solutions. So, you know, I think this is the one big lesson that I wish that people would internalize

• 20:31Speaker 02

  is that, you know, in the face of uncertainty, in the face of chance and chaos, you can't tame it, you can't overcome it, you can adapt to it. And the way to adapt to it is by building resilience into your life and experimenting a heck of a lot more than you normally do.

• 20:44Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think you're right. Experimentation is not something we're taught to do, you know? We're kind of taught in school to find the right answer, and once you find it, you're done. So you don't need to come up with another right answer, which is what experimentation is all about, trying different things.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, the one example of this that I absolutely love, that's from the animal kingdom, is how the human eye came to be. And it's just undirected experimentation, and eventually nature's created this unbelievably complex eye. But the extraordinary bit is that if you look at octopus eyes and human eyes, they're almost identical, even though they're totally, totally different species. And the reason is because through experimentation, nature came up with a solution that worked twice, right? And I think this is a parable for us. It's to say that, you know, the more that you sort of just think, solution A is good enough, is the sort of end of innovation. And I think this is where a lot of us, you know, I think about my own life, but prior

• 21:45Speaker 02

  to Fluke as well, prior to writing this book, I experimented a heck of a lot less. And I, I, I think that it was because I sort of figured, it's fine. And I think now I'm more open to the idea of alternative possibilities, alternative, you know, ways of solving problems, even in, you know, trying new restaurants, trying, you know, exploring, not using Google Maps to get to a destination. And I think that's the way that we're supposed to live. I mean, I think it's something that actually gives us serendipity. It gives us an enjoyment of life and it actually produces better solutions to problems. Because, you know, the Google Maps way is not always the right way for every single person. And the modern world solves problems for the average person, not for you, right? That's what Google Maps is. And I think that's something where we have to remember that some of the technological

• 22:27Speaker 02

  solutions we're being given are for the median person. They're not for tailored to each individual.

• 22:34Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I know I have. If you've ever had something bad happen, like, you know, you get into a car accident or something, you do that thing where you think, God, if I had only stayed in bed or stayed in the shower, you know, 30 seconds longer, this would have never happened. But you're putting a much bigger context around that concept. And it's really important to consider how it affects your life. Brian Klaas has been my guest. He is an associate professor at the University College in London. And the name of his book is Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters. And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Brian.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Hey, thanks so much for having me on the show. I appreciate it.

• 23:22Mike Carruthers?

  Big tech. When I say big tech, you get an image in your mind of, I don't know, Apple, Google, Facebook, and other monster companies that dominate a big slice of our life today. I mean, imagine your life without your smartphone, or your laptop, or social media. We've come to rely on these companies for the things they produce and create. And when there are big dominant players in an industry like this, people get concerned. The government gets concerned. There are cries to rein these companies in and regulate them. Maybe that's a good thing. But on the other hand, government has a bit of a checkered past when they start regulating things. But if not government, who? It gets complicated.

• 24:07Mike Carruthers?

  Here to discuss this is Tom Wheeler. He's a venture capitalist, author of several books, and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission during the Obama administration. His latest book is called Tech Lash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age? Hey, Tom, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Mike, great to be with you. Thank you.

• 24:29Mike Carruthers?

  So, set the stage for me here. What is the, what is the problem? What's the issue? What's the concern?

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Well, you know, we have a collection of digital technology-driven companies that have done some absolutely amazing things, and in the process have built themselves to be dominant companies. So, four of the five most valuable companies in the world are what you might call American big tech companies. Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon. And Meta comes in at number six.

• 25:17Mike Carruthers?

  And clearly, those are big companies. But, but being dominant isn't evil in and of itself. So, what is the concern? What's, so we have these big companies doing this stuff. What is it you're worried about?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  Well, there's nothing wrong with being big. Let's start right there. There's nothing wrong with being capitalists. I'm a capital C capitalist myself. The, the reality that we find ourselves in today, however, is that as the digital age evolved, these companies ended up...

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Making the rules. And the result is the digital economy is the largest unsupervised component of the American economy. When you have a lack of supervision and you have companies making the rules as though they were pseudo governments. Ultimately, you end up having a negative impact on consumers, on the public interest, on the rights of individuals. And so what I'm proposing is that we need to celebrate this kind of innovation,

• 26:39Speaker 03

  but we need to put guardrails around it to protect consumers, competition, truth, and the kinds of things that we've seen get pummeled lately in the digital environment.

• 26:54Mike Carruthers?

  And so what are some of those kind, rather than just talking the abstract, what specifically are they doing, decisions they're making, policies they're implementing that are of such concern? Things like what?

• 27:07Speaker 03

  Well, let's just start with the basic. Your private information and my private information. It used to be that it was our information. It was our private goings on. And the internet has allowed it to be inexpensively captured, stored, and sorted so that it has become less your personal property and more a corporate asset without any rules. You know, it was Mark Zuckerberg, who a few years ago unilaterally said,

• 27:51Speaker 03

  you know, I don't think privacy is a social norm anymore. And changed the rules at Facebook in terms of what kind of information they would gather about you.

• 28:05Speaker 03

  And from privacy comes essentially everything else. Out of that basis, that set of assets that are your information and my information comes the ability to control markets because he who controls the asset, the principal asset of that market, which is data, the information, the private information, controls the market.

• 28:32Mike Carruthers?

  Well, here's the thing that I find so fascinating about this is that people in policy making decisions scream and yell about privacy and information and that we have to control it and we have to regulate it. But when you talk to people, they, on a very practical level, they don't seem that concerned about it. They have Alexas in their house that theoretically could be listening to everything going on and they still buy them, they still do it. They use all these things, they never read the terms of service. They don't seem to be that concerned and sort of agree with Mark Zuckerberg that privacy's over, that's done and let's just move on.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Gee, I think you and I probably look at different sources of information then because lots of, you know, there is a huge percentage of American consumers who worry about their privacy. I think to your point, there is also a large, "Well, I haven't got any choice in this situation." And, you know, which is a reality that I face. I mean, you just hit on a very, very key thing here, Mike, that if I am going to get a service, a digital service, as a condition precedent to receiving that, I have to sign

• 29:58Speaker 03

  away, I have to agree on these multiple pages of small print legalese that in essence says, "Hey, we're not giving you the product until you turn over all your privacy rights." You know, lawyers call that a contract of adhesion. You know, I call it, I have your inform, I, I have what you want and I'm not gonna give it to you until you give me your private information and allow me to follow you across the web anywhere. I think we need some kind of basic rules.

• 30:36Mike Carruthers?

  And so when you say some kind of basic rules, like what kind of basic rules? Give me, give me an example of what you're thinking.

• 30:44Speaker 03

  There's nothing wrong with saying, what about if we just collected the information that's necessary to conduct the transaction? That you go on Google and you put in a search and the information that's necessary for that. And to answer that doesn't include, for instance, your location and, um, and the last eight sites that you went to. But that's what gets collected. So we, we, we've reached a situation where we just need some basic guardrails. What are the rules?

• 31:26Speaker 03

  And, um, and those rules probably ought to be decided by folks other than those who, who profit by making, uh, self-interested, uh, rules, uh, for self-advancement.

• 31:44Mike Carruthers?

  Does that mean the government?

• 31:46Speaker 03

  One of the things that I propose is that we need a whole new approach to oversight. So first, the, the first component is what we, you and I've been talking about thus far. Is there a necessity for oversight of the activities of the dominant digital companies?

• 32:08Speaker 03

  And my feeling is yes. But the question then becomes what kind of oversight? And what I definitely do not believe in is the kind of oversight that we saw in the industrial era, which is micromanagement, top-down kind of activities that inhibit innovation, inhibit investment in this dynamic economy. So what we need is a whole new approach. We need to be as innovative in our oversight of the companies as the innovators themselves are in creating their new ideas.

• 32:51Mike Carruthers?

  So what do you say, though, to, and you know, you hear this argument sometimes. So if you don't want these companies keeping information, collecting and storing information about you, like on Facebook, don't use Facebook. You don't have to use, there's nothing in your life that requires you to use Facebook or Google. There are search engines that don't collect information. So these are private companies. If you don't want to abide by their terms of service, go somewhere else.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  The reality today is if you want to have an online relationship, if you want to be able to do commerce, if you want to be able to exchange with your, with your friends through a common platform, you have to do it. There is, the thing that changed the economics of, or that created the great opportunity for these digital platform companies is what the economists call network effects. And a network effect is basically that you go to a site because that's where everybody else is. You go to Facebook because that's where your friends are.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  You go to Google because that's where the information is. And you may have another alternative to Google, but it doesn't have as rich a source of information as Google does. And so these network effects tend to produce a winner takes all kind of situation because all of the activities used to be,

• 34:39Speaker 03

  the competitive activities get wrung out by the very design of the system that takes advantage of these network effects. So if we have a new set of realities like that, and again, I'm not for stepping in and having heavy-handed regulation, but I think that there should be some basic ground rules. And I think the companies, by the way, ought to be involved in the establishment of those basic ground rules. So let's talk about how we do that.

• 35:13Speaker 03

  So why do you suppose? I came out of the industry, Mike. Yeah, I know. And I, you know, watched, for instance, the evolution from 1G to 2G to 3G to 4G to 5G and now 6G for smartphones. Why do those changes take place? Well, it took place because technology changed and the market changed. And the companies said, we want to evolve with that. And so we will get together and we will develop technical standards so that you can, any device works on any network in any country.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Major breakthrough, but then they stopped. And they didn't say, well, let's think, what are the consequences of this? And should we have behavioral standards? You talked about your experience with Alexa a few minutes ago. There is an industry group putting together the technical standards so that all of the connected devices in the house will be able to interface with each other. It is a terrifically good idea. I mean, I guess there's a purpose why Roomba ought to talk to Alexa. But the fact of the matter is the, the, the, the technical standards are being, are being built.

• 36:41Speaker 03

  The industry also needs to say, okay, and here are the behavioral standards. Here's what we're going to collect. Here's how we're going to deal with children. Here's how we're going to deal with how much information gets saved. Here's how we're going to, and have, and have behavioral effects that are governed by a code that is established by a multi-stakeholder process that includes the industry and the government and is enforceable.

• 37:14Mike Carruthers?

  Why do you think there is such resistance? Why, why, why don't the companies go, you know, this is a good idea. Why don't we, why don't we all work together and fix this? And then you'll get off our backs and you won't be writing books about how horrible we are. And, and we'll all live our lives again.

• 37:31Speaker 03

  I, I don't think they're horrible. I mean, I think these are amazing.

• 37:34Mike Carruthers?

  No, I, I know.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  I know, I know, I know the people who run them and these are not evil people. And I think that a very wise strategy would be for them to do just that. To say, hey, let's step up and, and come forth with our rules, our own standards. It's very interesting to me that that's what we're beginning to see happening in the world of artificial intelligence. You know, you've got Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and others saying, hey, we need some kind of a regulatory program to establish what the rules are. I think that makes a lot of sense. And, and I think that it is even more interesting that the companies that have been.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Historically opposed to any kind of government oversight, now with AI are saying, "Oh, we need to have oversight." You know, Sudar Pichai, the CEO of Google, said that AI is too important not to regulate and too important not to regulate well. I couldn't have said it better myself. And so they're saying, "How do we have that? Let's have that debate." So hopefully, maybe AI is part of the breakthrough that will change things.

• 38:59Mike Carruthers?

  Do you think this is gonna happen? Do you think that, I mean, it seems inevitable that at some point, there's just gonna have to be an agreement that this has got to come under some umbrella somewhere and the Wild West days have to end?

• 39:14Speaker 03

  Yes. And the frightening thing to me, and I use the word frightening, not casually.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  If I were an American company, I would be truly frightened by the fact that the rules are being made in the rest of the world right now. That the European Union, the UK, China are all making the rules. All the kinds of things that you and I have discussed thus far.

• 39:44Speaker 03

  While the United States government has been taking a hands-off approach, the European Union and the UK have been stepping in and saying, "We're going to do something about it." And so the Digital Services Act will deal with, the UK, I'm sorry, the EU just passed, will deal with content issues. The Digital Markets Act will deal with marketplace behavior issues. We're about to see passage of the Data Act by the EU. We're about to see passage of the AI Act by the EU. And now that the UK is out of the EU, they're doing similar things.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  And in an interconnected world, which is what the Internet has delivered, what happens in the EU or the UK?

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Has a very real impact on what happens in the United States.

• 40:44Mike Carruthers?

  What about the problem of trying to regulate an industry that changes so much that by the time you put regulations in place, they're obsolete because the industry has already moved beyond that?

• 40:58Speaker 03

  This is not a situation where we go clone what worked before. You know, when I was running the Federal Communications Commission, one of the biggest challenges was that was that the statute which created the agency and created the rules under which the agency operated was written in 1934 when television didn't even exist. And it was updated in 1996 when the internet was AOL. And so, one of the big challenges that I faced and that all regulators face is how

• 41:41Speaker 03

  do I take a set of rigid statutory and structural realities that were made rigid back in a time that was vastly different from today and relate them to today? And so, we need to, to, to, to say, again, like I was saying before, never before seen challenges, never before seen solutions. We need to be as innovative as the companies themselves in how we come up with solutions to the challenges that are created.

• 42:19Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is certainly a topic that so many people talk about. I mean, something has to be done, you know? There's so many problems with the internet and it isn't an easy problem to solve, but I like the fact that people like you are talking about it. Tom Wheeler has been my guest. He is a venture capitalist, author of several books. He is a former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission in the Obama administration and his latest book is called Tech Lash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age? And if you'd like to read it, there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it, Tom. Thank you for coming on today.

• 43:02Mike Carruthers?

  I'm not sure I remember hearing this before, but there is some pretty strong evidence that teenagers and young children who eat fast food are increasing their risk of asthma, eczema, hay fever, and other respiratory issues. According to a study, the association was most common in children aged six to seven and adolescents ages thirteen to fourteen. If your kids can't kick the fast food habit, then consider stocking up on some fruit. The study also found that those who ate fresh fruit at least three times a week were somewhat protected from the fast food afflictions. And that is something you should know.

• 43:47Mike Carruthers?

  You know, there's no such thing as too many listeners to a podcast. We're always looking to find new listeners who we think would enjoy it, and the best way to find them is for people like you who listen to spread the word. So please tell a friend or two, or three or four, to give this podcast a listen and see what they think. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 44:13Speaker 00

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