 science. Science has given us social media. We're going to talk about that today. Hi, Ethan. Hi, Jay. But let's not blame social media strictly on science here. It's a creature of the culture, you know. Thank you. It's a creature of humanity. Right. You know, this is, you know, you look, for example, you're looking at an antel and you wonder why they all go in one direction or the other and do their things together. You know, sort of an automatic DNA collaboration. It's the way it is. And it is the way it is with the human species, too. We do collaborate and sometimes our collaboration goes off the track. We don't always collaborate well, you know. Right. Although it has gotten us this far, our question is what happens now. Right. And so, you know, talking with a friend of mine about, you know, how the government is doing, how the democracy contemplated by the founders is doing. And so we made a little list of the branches of government to see how they were doing. The executive is turning into an authoritarian dictatorship. Some people call it a sole proprietorship, not a government. You know, where he's running everything and his departments are inconsequential and he's got this technique of making people do exactly what he wants and not talking back or he punishes them. Look at this new investigation into the, you know, the creation of the investigation, the mother investigation. That's punishment, you know, what it is. So what you have is a kind of dictatorship emerging and that branch of government is compromised, changing in front of our eyes, as a matter of fact, and we can't seem to do anything about it. The legislature, the Congress is also, it's dramatically changed, profoundly changed, and it is non-functional. Wait till September, when we get back to the money issues and the budget issues, it could be the biggest disaster in American history. Yeah, finally, on the ground, it seems to be lost. Yeah, and Congress has not done any real business for at least two years now. So we're in deep kimchi about the legislative branch. It's non-functional. Okay, then we get into the judicial. You know, this has been coming for a while through a couple of public administrations where, you know, the people in the constituencies that surround the president have had a big effect on his appointments of judges, and we have had a serious, you know, shift to the appointment of conservative judges. And Obama's judges, they couldn't even get a hearing. So now we have lots of federal courts, which are really turned to the right. And, you know, I mean, there's various people there. Some of them may, may, you know, find a better way, but a lot of them are stuck in this kind of Republican conservative ideology, which does not include preserving the Constitution, which means, you know, following the Donald Trump's view of the world, which is really not, not what the founder's intended, and following his, following his, you know, view of things and his agenda. So in many ways, the federal courts are compromised and continue to be, you know, while we deal with all of his Michigás, you know, over the daily grind, you know, the, what do you call it, the reality show that he creates for us. We don't realize that there's a huge number of judges that would be appointed and quietly confirmed by the Republican Senate without, without any discussion at all. They just rubber stamp whoever he appoints. This is really problematic. Okay, and okay, then you get, you get other, those are the three branches of government. And the department heads have become obedient or non-existent or appointed on a, you know, what do you call it, an acting basis. So we don't hear much from them except we hear how bad they are. The, my goodness, the press is losing ground. You know, he says the failing New York Times, he says, and you know, I'm not, I'm not sure what that means, but I noticed that CNN just did early outs for a hundred of its news staff. So some of the press may not be making enough money to continue the, the fight, so to speak, against the failing government. Then we have education. Education has not been right in this country for decades. And we have the product of it of people who are really not educated or do critical thinking or read the newspaper to the extent there are still newspapers. 2,400, you know, was it journalists or newspapers that disappeared in the last couple of years. So the public getting educated. They should, they should watch Think Tech. We can help. There we go. So that, and you know, the inability of the public to actually engage on, on political issues and on, you know, national issues is, is becoming a real impediment to the national decision process. Yeah. And so you're blaming all these ills on social media? No, I'm not. But I'm saying one of the other elements in this pie, which we talk, we should talk about today is social media. It has emerged. It has replaced the press in many ways. It has had a huge effect on the executive who uses it to communicate directly to the public without, you know, any real thought process, whatever, whatever he does in the morning, whatever hamburger he has for breakfast at three in the morning, you know, whatever, whatever his immediate inclinations are, bingo, it's on, it's on Twitter. And other politicians are doing that too. He's not the only one. Social media has a huge effect among the electorate who may not be educated or reading papers because there aren't so many papers. They are getting their information from social media. And then you have foreign countries coming in and trying to affect our elections and our thought process and divide us and neutralize our political will. Okay, they're using social media. It's important we should understand some of why social media has this kind of influence and impact, right? That's it. Right. And I mean, there's a few reasons right off the bat. It's very timely, right? You can something can go wrong and literally six out of seven people in the planet can know about it in moments. I mean, it's that pervasive now, you know, in terms of having access to social media. Two, it's short and catchy. Typically, social media things are a few words, a sentence, one picture, right? You don't have to spend 20 minutes reading through six pages of detailed texts. You don't have to decipher complex graphs. You don't have to deeply think about it. It's some little blurb, some little instant message, some little tweet of 140 or 280 characters, right? That's very appealing. And then there's a really the subtle but underlying problem is basically bad news is something we pay a lot of attention to people. And that's built into our DNA because our ancestors who didn't pay attention to potentially bad news didn't survive. You can afford not to pay attention to good news, you could afford miss a meal, miss out on a mating opportunity, whatever, that really didn't hurt you too badly. But you missed out on the rustling in the bush that was, you know, a lion, you didn't reproduce. So we are we come by this ability to pay attention to, to hear, to focus in on bad news exorbitantly, way out of balance. And those things that it's short, it's, it's pithy, easy to remember, and it's negative. That's what social media is so good at doing, right? Now, you could argue they should be able to do that with good news, but they have to do it twice as hard to make it work. Now, it's a weapon. I mean, you want to assassinate somebody in public social media will help you do that. Right. Right. You want to you want to tell lies, social media will will extend your opportunities globally to tell lies. You know, any lie that's repeated often enough, some people begin to believe it. You could you could start saying sunrise in the West. And if Donald Trump tweeted that zillion times, there'd be a fair number of people who would agree this unrises in the West. Right. So it confuses things, it un clarifies things. Right. And at the end of the day, it's divisive. I think by its nature, it's divisive. You don't have to be a Russian, a Russian misinformation person to, to make social media divide people. It has an inherent ability to divide people. Right. I would argue that it has that same ability to be used to bring people together. That's not what's happening, though. But it's not being used that way. It is a technology that's not relatively neutral, but is being used more to insert those wedges to help make people think opposite ways, drive them into one camp or another rather than helping us understand our commonalities. Right. So you you can create create little communities that are distinguished themselves from all other communities. And these communities are divided in these communities cannot. Well, they they stand in the way of national will. Right. They stand in the way of positive developments, because they're always arguing with each other. Right. And then you throw into social media little threats. Again, this is negative stuff. And so you pay a lot of attention. You pretend you put some message out about your community being under siege under threat from some other community. And sort of fear monitoring. Yes, people hear it. They retweet it. They remember it, spread it. And the next person who hears it remembers it to spread it. Yeah, it tends tends to go big. Hey, let's talk about hate. Yeah, social media is a natural for hate. Right. I mean, it is it's a channel. Yeah, opens itself up to spread that right. And it's too bad because it could be used to help. You know, I mean, really, to help us all see our common ground, right? You see the person in outer Mongolia is facing the same problems as we are, you know, they want to survive they want to happy, healthy family, you know, they want to get along in the world. They want to, you know, pass good things along to their kids and their kids kids. All of us want those same things, right? And social media could be reinforcing that message. But that doesn't really suit a lot of people to do that. So when Zuckerberg was, you know, an undergraduate at Harvard, and he wanted to help people get dates. Really? He never he never envisioned that this would happen. And he's the leader and he's picking up steam as a matter of fact. And the notion of trying to, you know, satisfy governmental concerns and, you know, congressional inquiries and all that. That's not going to happen. I don't think I don't think Facebook is going to change materially. I don't think it's going to happen. It's going to continue. It's going to expand. It's driven, at least as far as the owners and Zuckerberg are concerned by money and power. You know, it must give them a certain psychic benefit to know that they have a platform that is universal, ubiquitous everywhere in the world. Just a couple of decades, he's just moving, move this whole new introduce this whole new vehicle for communication that is now so widely used that literally, you know, six sevenths of the Earth's population, you know, has access to it. It's going to continue. Right. You know, one of the things about it is that you and I may have a computer at home, or a television, a cable television where you listen to certain news. But you know, a lot of people in the world, they only have phones. And phones are the perfect device, the perfect platform. Social media is so effective. You know, for a few bucks, you can have, you can be part of this huge global community. Right. So what you have, I think, you have, you know, in many places, increasing, I think, you have governments becoming more autocratic, you have legislative systems that are failing. You have, you have education that isn't really so good. You have, you have social media, you have social media that all these things create a kind of intellectual vacuum among people. They need to be part of a larger, a larger group. They need information. They need to be told what to do. They need to, you know, need to satisfy those fears talked about. And social media to the rescue, it comes and it sort of fills the void for them. Right. And it actually reinforces the failure of government and the failure of positive institutions that can actually work together for, you know, effective and constructive political will. So I think what's happening in the US is a, is a sort of, it runs a parallel to what's happening in many other places. Oh, yeah, we see, we see very similar things happening in the Philippines, various parts of Europe these days. Venezuela. Yeah, Venezuela. You know, it's all subject to manipulation. It's also subject to misinformation. And there are people out there, it's not just Putin, by the way, there are people out there would love to see these governmental institutions crumble, be confused and crumble. They would love to see chaos. Because if somebody else is in chaos, you're better, you're better off. And you have leverage over that. Yeah, it's classic zero sum thinking, right? You know, somebody else for me to gain somebody has to lose, right? And that's, that's unfortunate. We don't, we don't have to play that game, right? We can all realize that we can all rise together and become better, better people and better countries, do better things, help one another, create good stuff by working together by really collaborating as we do have, we do have a very fundamental instincts to do that. Yeah. Oh, really? Yeah. We would not have survived as a species if we were not collaborating. So far, so far, so good. But maybe there are too many of us. Maybe we're at a tipping point in the species and in human history, where we cannot support, you know, eight billion people anymore. And what we have built is is going to come apart and, and leave the world able to support only x billion less. I will I will have to say in sort of opposition to your rather dark trend analysis here that you're making, you're making a convincing case. If you read Steven Pinker's book, Enlightenment Now, he presents a massive array of data. It's a big book, a massive data set after data set after data set that says basically, no, we're doing really well. Okay, violence is down, education is up, lifespan is up, health is doing better. All these things were really doing much better. And it's a very consistent trend around countries all around the world for decades, if not centuries. Yeah, once he's smoking, let's take a short break, Ethan, we'll come back and we'll come around to these positive things that he talks about that you talk about. And we'll see if we can sort of make a little list of all the things that are positive, and all the things we need to do to achieve a positive result or save ourselves, if you will, there we go in the in our lifetimes in the years coming coming soon, we'll be right back. I can hardly wait. We're going to make this a minute, but you know, we got to come back soon. 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Okay, well, Ethan Allen and I, we have we have joined issue, if you will, on the failure of customary, you know, developing institutions in our world today in our global village today. We have tried to paint, you know, try to figure out where social media fits in all of that. And he has pointed out that going forward there may be a better picture available to us and social media will definitely be involved in that picture. And since this is lackable science, the first thing we should do before we figure out, you know, the affirmative steps to take is we should evaluate where this science is going. And I, you know, I want to ask you, Ethan, where is it going? And the first question, of course, is the platform itself? Because if I tell you that of the 8 billion people, it won't be long before all 8 billion people, and maybe more, have the platform and they are therefore are involved in social media. So the question is, what is science and technology going to do? First thing is, well, 5G is coming. It's inevitable. It's going to come to all of those devices. And everybody is going to have the benefit of that. But I think there's more social media in terms of software, it will become more sophisticated. I don't think, as I said before, I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg is really going to fix the problems that ale us. But he will advance the advanced the technology will have, you know, more magnetic and highly leveraged function functionality with social media. Right. So, so yes, I'd like to know what we can do. But first, can you tell me how this is going to become more powerful in the years to come? Well, I mean, I think if you simply look at the trends over the past years, you know, more people are using more social media more often for more things now. And we see no reason I see no reason why that's going to change. People can just say, Oh, no, I don't want to do that anymore. At least I don't, I don't believe that's going to happen. So yes, the question then becomes, is it going to materially change direction some sense is is social media going to become more of a force for unification for good for education for learning or before us? First of all, I mean, one of the things that came up maybe 90 days ago was when Trump said he was establishing a national social media system, where he could speak to the nation about national issues, maybe national emergencies, for example, where he would get on the horn, so to speak, he would get on his Twitter account or some other social media. And he would talk to us all 320 million of us right now today, him to us mano a mano talk to all of us and that's perfectly doable, especially for a president who sees the benefit of having social media connections with everyone in the country. He doesn't need no no legislature. He doesn't need no department heads. He doesn't need no courts. He wants to talk to us. After all, he's doing a soul, a soul enterprise, a soul, a soul proprietorship type government. So I see that coming in the future, where a person in political power will control social media in some way like that, and will be able to talk to us, all of us, and give us comments, news, lies, instructions. Gosh, I don't know what. Don't you think that's coming and how would that affect things? It might well be coming. I guess I'm maybe a little more of an optimist than you. I think there are probably enough people in the legislative and judicial branches who are power hungry enough themselves that they will resent being squashed down and made into nobodies, and they will stand up and say, no, you can't do this. We have a constitution that says there are three co-equal branches of government, and we insist upon having our say. That wouldn't be in the US Senate, but maybe in the House. House so far, right? Yes, and that's our big hope, I agree. And so, yeah, I mean, that is frightening. If he can co-opt, if anyone in authority can co-opt that much bandwidth, basically, of that many people that often they can insert a very powerful message that they can tell whatever message they want and tell often enough enough people that some percentage of people will absolutely believe it, even if it's completely ridiculous. That's happening now. Oh, yeah. But let me take my tongue-in-cheek suggestion even further. So, okay, he is the master. This one leader is the master of social media in this country. Social media is ubiquitous. It's in every country, and to the extent that he can leverage the ability to speak to every country, then he would do that. And we could conceivably get to a point where one person, through social media, and degrading all forms of representative government and all that, can speak to the world and tell them what to do and tell them the truth, or maybe not. Isn't that in the cards with social media? Isn't that the cards the way humanity works? Isn't that the cards with the evolution of the species using this kind of technology? How can we moderate that? How can we stop that? I don't see any significant steps being taken to restrain that possibility. No, I mean, I suspect, if it doesn't happen from a central authoritarian government figure, I could see it happening sort of on the dark side of things. Some, now to the blue, some voice is talking to us all. And yes, big brother. Yes, we're co-opting all of our channels and telling us whatever it wants to tell us. Right, and people are following. You know, it's like in China, Xi Jinping has this social quotient thing, where everything you do, everywhere you go, you're being watched and rated measured. And then you have a very complicated algorithm that gives you a social quotient. And that determines whether you can get on a train or a plane, whether you have advantages in your business or a personal life. Financing possibility, the whole thing, is determined by this algorithm. And people in China, now not everybody agrees, but people in China go along with it, because they feel that it helps raise the level of obedience of conduct that is constructive to support Xi Jinping and Xi Jinping and the country in general. So they have been, I don't want to say brainwashed, but they have come to the point where this works for them and they'll support it. Even though in the US, at least theoretically, not a lot of people would go for that. So, you know, it's the same thing here, isn't it? There are people who support what Trump does, even though it's ridiculous what he does, it's irrational what he does, it's obviously not helping anyone, but they support it anyway. It's helping a few people, a lot of them will ask them to help. It's helping a few of his friends, but not helping the poor guys in the south, for example, who are losing the social safety net, but continuing to support him anyway. So, you know, there's a kind of hypnotic trance involved in all of this. And I think social media includes that. It's a weird thing. It's a weird part of that DNA you spoke of. Yeah, and this is why I think that there really should be a conversation like this happening more on national level. And what do we want social media to do? You know, do we really want it to become a vehicle for an authoritarian figure to brainwash the whole population? I don't really want that. You don't want it. And I actually suspect most people don't want it. You want it to be a forum for dialogue and to share our common wishes, our better desires? Yes, I think, again, most people would say we do, you know. So, let's let's do that. Let's help make it. Let's essentially tell the people who are in charge of social media, Mark Huckerberg and his pals, that no, we don't really want hate speech on there. We don't want people urging violence. We don't want people posting videos of school shootings. You know, we really want, you know, people, you know, running campaigns for the social good, helping those in need, working on humanitarian relief projects, highlighting situations where the world is getting better, you know, even in adverse circumstances. This is the Enlightenment you talked about. Exactly. Well, you know, I wonder if there's a way to measure if we're going there or not going there. I mean, I think there's a lot of people in the world who are well-intentioned, who want to do the right thing, who believe in decency and fairness and future fellow man well and all that, right woman. But you know, but the question really is where was the drift? I don't know if this is something we can get metrics on, but there's a possibility, and I would entertain it as a possibility, that more and more social media is a weapon against all of that. It's to hurt people. It's to spread disinformation. It's to manipulate people. It's all the wrong things. And as you said before, I mean, there's a certain thing in the human DNA that is afraid and that seeks bad news because bad news is threatening in some way and the human species needs to know bad news and so we've formed little communities and we are so angry with the other community. I mean, I see social media as an essential element in the divisiveness that he, Trump, is suggesting. And so if you look at some of these shootings, for example, right, you find that people were motivated by social media to do these horrendous crimes. That's very significant in terms of the way it works. Absolutely. And that is, I think it's, again, it's a technology, it's sort of neutral, but because of human nature, it's being commonly used more in a negative sense than a positive sense. So it means there needs to be a concerted effort on all of our parts, basically, to turn it around. He use it, make it an instrument for social good. It's not going to happen overnight. It's not going to happen just because you say it or I say it. It's going to happen when millions and millions of people demand that change and say, no, we don't want to hear this crap. We don't want, we don't want bullying. We don't want, you know, mayhem and violence to become our daily diet. We really want to, we want social media to help us be the best we can be and make the world the best place. I certainly agree that would be wonderful, but I feel it's a kind of race. It's a race between the good and the bad. It's a race between, you know, water crats and the good guys and the query whether the good guys have a leader that will lead them in that direction. The jury is out. Right. But I think we're starting off with a lot behind, the good guys are somewhat behind in this race. Well, I'm, I'm comforted, but only to a limited degree. This conversation has to continue. Yes. You know, we planted our flags on various positions here. We have to look back later and see how it all worked out. True. True. Will you come back? I certainly do. Come back and join you. All right. Sounds excellent. Thank you, Ethan. Take care. So science is not always likeable.