 It certainly creates a much stronger conditioning when the reward is variable, unpredictable. So you want a variable reward? Here it is, right here. Because when that email goes off, you don't know if it's good or bad. It's the lottery. It's the slot machine. You've got a slot machine in your pocket. I think there are actually multiple processes involved in what leads to these unhealthy relationships with smartphones. So there's social anxiety, there's our desire for approval, there's avoidance. So when we don't want to really confront uncomfortable things, we can use our phones as an escape. All these kind of things were always with us, but this technology is amplifying all of them. Most people, especially around here, have jobs that require them to use computers. And computers have now become this force that has kind of inserted itself into our lives and we can't extricate ourselves from it voluntarily. There's this interesting rising tide of, hey, maybe we should be teaching ethics, maybe we should be teaching emotional intelligence and diversity and inclusion equity and authentic relating, divergent thinking. In addition, you're typing while you're talking to the patient instead of talking to the patient. There's no eye contact. The entire humanity of the medical discourse is gone. When your child's born with an iPad rather than your child's born with looking at the eyes of other humans. Clinical depression is up 18.5% worldwide. Wow. 4.4% of all people on the planet now carry a diagnosis of clinical depression. What's up, all you beautiful people? How you doing? Yeah. Woo! Some good energy. I love it. I love it. Are you guys excited to talk about ethical tech? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we're excited. We're really excited. Psychology, neuroscience, behavioral ethics and behavioral economics, attention economics, social media 2.0, mental health and well-being. The list is never ending. All of these complex disciplines that merge together into what we will be talking about today. Who here has been to a simulation event before? Little applause for that. Let's hear it. Yeah, let's hear it. Okay, so we got a bunch of, some people have, some people are newbies, cool stuff. My name is Alan Sock and I host simulation. We're rebirthing the public intellectual or multidisciplinary daily show and live events series. We're hoping to scale our live events up at the sports stadiums. Reese Jones told me that that was not ambitious enough of a dream. He's been helping me figure things out. How to do it. Much love to you guys for coming out tonight. This is in partnership with work wise. This is in partnership with civility. Before bringing max up the founder civility to talk to you guys about civility, which is freaking awesome. I want to thank work wise. As you can tell the space is very green. It's very open. It invites very creative people here to collaborate in and they have a very strong back end system that links people together that are building important futures. So definitely go check out work wise. The founders are not here tonight, which is why they're not speaking about it, but check them out work wise.com. Huge thank you for hosting us. Max Marty, go ahead and join us. Talk about civility, man. We're elevating conversation. I'm really excited to be hosting this with you. Indeed, indeed. Thank you, Alan. Yep. Thank you everybody for coming out out of curiosity. Who here has been to a civility discussion? A pause. Yeah. Did we beat you there, Alan? I don't know. Kind of even. Kind of even. All right. All right. So for those of you who don't know, civility is a service that allows intellectually curious people like yourselves to be able to coordinate in person face to face discussions on topics of interest to them. And this tonight is sort of like a civility discussion, although with two important, two very big and important differences. Firstly, civility discussions usually don't involve lights and an audience and cameras and all this other stuff, right? It's like an in-person discussion, six people, just like here, but without all of this additional excitement. And the other thing is that civility discussions are for intellectually curious people who are excited about a topic but are not necessarily subject matter experts, right? Like we have on the stage tonight. So with those two important differences, please enjoy this simulation of a civility discussion. It was a good one. Come on, come on. Thank you. Thank you. It's been all night on that one. All right. I want to make sure everybody who's here in the middle is building really important futures for the next evolution of how we engage with each other and through technology. And we have a very diverse array of people here. First, we have Will Mate here. He is the head of the San Francisco Bay Area Humane Tech chapter. Let's give it up for Will. Robert Lustig. Yeah. Pediatric endocrinologist and emeritus professor of pediatrics at UCSF. He's also the author of The Hacking of the American Mind, The Science of the Corporate Takeover of Our Bodies and Brains. Let's give Robert a round of applause. Joseph Vilgosh is a clinical psychologist and post-doc at Stanford researching neuroscience of well-being and mental health. Let's give it up for Joseph. And lastly, Andrew Murray Dunn, founder of SIEMPO. Woo! All right. So let's jump into conversation. There's so many things to talk about. I want to, maybe I want to start off by asking you four and Max as well. What's been your synthesis of everything that's been going on? Let's start with the synthesis and then we can break down into separate categories and things like that. Yeah. Who wants to start us off? It's a tough one to jump into, a synthesis of it all. Indeed. Since I'm holding the mic, I will begin. I think the synthesis of what we're seeing now is, hopefully in my opinion, a nascent societal shift in the way we view and interact with technology. Up until very recently, the overwhelming kind of cultural narrative that we've been living in is one where technology and in particular high technology, the internet computers have been really seen as very positive force in the world where people think that they can, people creating technology can kind of do no wrong and things like Facebook and Google and video games are very positive things that will shape our lives for the better. And just really in the last couple of years, people have started to kind of come to realize that there are actually all these negative externalities and effects of technology that they maybe didn't fully comprehend previously. And we are starting to see much more discussion and reflection on the role of technology in our lives and really taking a more holistic approach to understanding what it does to us. So I'm really curious to hear what everybody else has to say about the synthesis of the current state of technology, but that's my personal thought on where we are at the moment. So you two have that mic. So I'm going to be a little bit more dire and gloom and doom. And hold the mic closer. Fits my persona. What I see, I've been a pediatric endocrinologist for 40 years. What I see is a pandemic, not an epidemic, a pandemic of addiction and depression. Now you could say, well, you know, that's opioids and that's, you know, other things, but technology plays a huge role in that. It's not the only thing. In fact, there are five things that have happened to our society over the last 50 years. Technology, processed food, sugar, lack of sleep, drugs. And every single one of those affects the brain in exactly the same way. And when it affects the brain in exactly this same way, you end up with a neuroscientific meltdown. Excessive dopamine driving addiction and not enough serotonin driving depression. And addiction and depression are just two sides of the same coin. Now I'm not pinning it all on technology. But you have to explain why there's been a tripling in the suicide rate over the last 10 years since the introduction of the iPhone. We had processed food before that. We had lack of sleep before that. We had drugs before that. Something changed 10 years ago. Well said. Yes, that's a powerful statement. So my field is in the neuroscience of emotion and mental health and well-being. And I really said some of the things that I've been thinking about which are that we have kind of a new, something new in our society to grapple with just the same way as we've had to grapple with new chemicals, new foods, new changes to our environment in the past. And part of what's happening is we are figuring out our relationship with it and with our brains which evolutionarily are much older and are designed to handle a much different set of influences. So one of the things that we are in the process of doing and I see happening around me now and maybe I'll strike a little bit more of an optimistic tone just for balance sake is that we're evolving systems, we're evolving norms in socially and we're also evolving personal practices and elements of our lifestyle that will allow us to maintain mental health and well-being, which is really my central concern in an environment where we have this new and confusing and bewildering and unpredictable technology available to us. You're yin and yang right there. Actually I thought we said the same thing. Yeah, yeah. As a startup founder I'm running up against the friction of existing economic models with the intentions of alignment with the best interests of people and the planet. And yeah, it's this challenge of living in integrity with what we know needs to happen and minimizing the unintended consequences, the unknown unknowns with trying to create a real business that sustains itself and grows. And so this challenge of how do we fuel private sector innovation in a system that rewards the fast exit to grow at all costs, whether it's negative externalities or the mental health of employees. And yeah, that's what I'm seeing. I think I would add that there's been a confluence of factors outside of merely the hard work of a number of companies like Facebook and Twitter and such who actually addict us. But like Robert was saying, it's a number of factors that are potentially coming together and breaking the camel's back in this situation. However, optimistically I would also add that innovators have always, we get into these new paradigms that look scary and dangerous with the advent of new technologies, especially new information technologies. But I think that we will develop a cultural immune system through the new sets of norms and such as we've been describing. And hopefully innovators, especially given where we are here in the Bay Area, who are finally waking up to the many problems that are being caused by these companies are going to be stepping up and offering all of us better alternatives that speak more to the humanity in us and to the life that we actually want to live. Nice. Good synthesises. There's something about when I look at the evolution of the internet age, which is where I kind of want to take us next. Robert started us a little bit in the realm of what to attribute the increase in suicide, threefold suicide increase. Is that in the United States or in the world? Go ahead and take the mic when you speak so we can get on. Those data for the United States, but clinical depression is up 18.5% worldwide. Wow. 4.4% of all people on the planet now carry a diagnosis of clinical depression. So this is an extremely nuanced topic. We like to get into the multivariability and not just binary thinking on topics. And this especially is a really tough one because it's really quite incredible that you can do a video chat with someone on the other half of the planet. But it's also kind of crazy that they can ping you anytime and disrupt your workflow. So this is the nuance that we hope to unpack in this civil discourse. I want to see what do you guys think about now the evolution of technology in the internet age and how that's affected humanity? We're starting to unpack that, so I want to know what you think. It used to be that you had to write a letter and then you had to wait for it to get to someone. Does anyone remember that? Who's old enough to remember that? Yeah, there we go. No, I don't. No, I don't. No, I don't. It's so funny. I got called out. She's like, you don't remember that. Yeah, punk. Yeah, that's funny. So now it's an instant message. You don't have to wait. So now how many more messages are we sending because they're instant instead of having to wait so long, etc. So tell us about what your thoughts are on the evolution of technology in the internet age and how it's affected humanity. One thing I think is really fascinating about the current paradigm that we're living in with technology is this phenomenon of technology having a lot of utility for people. So it's really useful. I mean, nobody's denying that the internet's been super helpful in a lot of regards. However, the very tools that we use to make our lives better are often wrapped up in other things that actually make our lives worse. So for example, if you're trying to connect with your friends who don't live in the same place that you do, now there's this wonderful thing that we can use to do that, but that tool is actually designed to be addictive. So you wind up addicted to a service that you really can't not use in many instances. I mean, you can go completely off the grid and live in the woods and remove yourself from society. A bunch of yurts offstage here. Yeah, so you can live in a yurt, but you can't participate in society without also indulging yourself in these technologies that can totally loop you in. I think that's a really shocking situation to be in. For example, nobody has a job smoking cigarettes or watching television or, I mean, very, very few people. Maybe you can say that there's like the Marlboro advertisers who get paid to model with cigarettes. But in general, people do not have jobs using addictive substances or gambling or any other kind of canonical example of addiction. However, most people, especially around here, have jobs that require them to use computers, and computers have now become this force that has kind of inserted itself into our lives and we can't extricate ourselves from it voluntarily. I should mention that I retired a year ago because of computers. It was the electronic medical record. It was either quit or die. We decided to quit. Wait, so tell us the introduction of the electronic medical record? Yeah, that killed me. Why? Why? Have you ever used it? Yeah, what about it? It's angst-provoking. You sit down at the keyboard and you can't make a screen go away. It's there forever. In addition, you're typing while you're talking to the patient instead of talking to the patient. There's no eye contact. The entire humanity of the medical discourse is gone. Your physician is now just ascribed. And when that happens, there's really no point in being a doctor. Well, what about looking at them and talking to them about how they feel and then when you come up with an analysis for the electronic health record, you can turn around and type it in. Sure, and you'll be home three hours later. I mean, it takes three hours to do the charting. So we moved to Mission Bay from Parnassus. So it's an hour commute there, an hour commute back, and three more hours of extra charting. Yeah, sure. My wife was real happy about that. And then there is also the benefit of being able to have a medical record that when you get an entry at different hospitals, they have a record of you. You know what? If you are cutting and pasting everyone else's notes into yours, you don't have a medical record. You don't have a running data stream. And you have to spend more time trying to fish out what's important than if you actually read somebody's note. So it doesn't work. If anybody reads The New Yorker, Atul Gawande just had a nice piece in The New Yorker just a week ago, why doctors hate computers exhibit A. Wow, yeah, yeah. Connection, that was a big point there, yeah. Right. And as a clinical psychologist, I actually, I also experience this in our whole job is really to create connection and empathy with our patients. And I've been in settings where we're actually expected to chart on the computer as we're talking to somebody about their emotional issues. And it's a real challenge. So I think this is definitely one of these areas where I hope, I mean, this is actually an area where maybe there's also a technological solution and we can get the screens out of the way and still be capturing useful information. Voice to text and then have that input into the fields potentially. Yeah, that kind of thing. But to talk about the evolution of internet technology, I think maybe this fits in. The thing that came to my mind is that it's an amplifier. So in mental health, particularly, there are all kinds of processes that have been with us, for instance, to take bullying in high schools and social judgment and kind of questing for social approval. All those things have been around for a long time. But now when you have text messaging, all of a sudden an entire school can actually, you know, bully a kid 24-7 with nobody around to even hear what they're saying. And at the same time on the flip side, you have Instagram and Snapchat where now you can be kind of basically constantly, not just kind of going to school and trying to wear something that the cool kids will like, and then actually basically doing your own fashion photo shoots all day every day and then constantly getting feedback and approval ratings and watching your ratings go up and down. So it's the same process. Disapproval ratings. Absolutely, right? And so there's the reward side of things and then I also think, I think there are actually multiple processes involved in what leads to these unhealthy relationships with smartphones. So there's social anxiety, there's our desire for approval, there's avoidance. So when we don't want to really confront uncomfortable things that we can use our phones as an escape, all of these kind of things were always with us but this technology is amplifying all of them. I'm tracking the evolution of consciousness of the people who are creating these tools. Technology is an extension of choice making power and throughout history consumer tech has become regulated when it is proven to be dangerous or have harmful impacts but we're seeing technology evolve so rapidly and there's this race to figure out the business model and pour the rocket fuel on it. So we're now bumping up against the limits of that and there's this interesting rising tide of, hey, maybe we should be teaching ethics, maybe we should be teaching emotional intelligence and diversity and inclusion equity and authentic relating, divergent thinking. So all these ways of asking, yeah, like what is the thing we're trying to do and how can we do it in a way that respects the human animal and allows for flourishing. And so it's really cool to see that start to be adopted more. I'm starting to see more friends who are engineers and some of these big companies and also founders, also investors who are really going deep and trying to understand their fears and their biases because everything we create is an expression of who we are and what we value. So that's going to go into your team, that's going to go into your product and we don't have a lot of answers because there's not a lot of great examples and stories to look to of people who've done that well. I'm excited to keep tracking it. Yeah. When you say that we should be teaching those sorts of values, do you mean we, the builders of these products, do you mean we, parents of children who are suffering in this situation, do you mean we, regulators, do you mean we, people who are concerned about this in the culture at large who want to speak about who are the we? I think we all have to explore these questions and I don't think a singular body of people or entities can make these decisions for such a complex societal topic. Yeah, except for one little problem. We have this thing called children. So I'm an old guy, I'm also a pediatrician. So I've gotten to watch a different evolution. I've gotten to watch the evolution of children in my clinic over the last 40 years. How many thousands of kids do you think you've seen? Altogether? Yeah. 40 years? Yeah. 20,000? 20,000. Maybe, you know, a few. So you know like one of the typical ice breakers that we used to say or ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? 40 years ago, doctor, lawyer, rocket scientist, baseball player, good humor man, you know, something. Last 15 years, you ask a kid, what do you want to be when you grow up? I don't know. Not a clue. Not a clue. So what happened? I'll tell you what happened. This happened. Because when the 15-month-old comes in and knows how to use the iPad better than me, they're doing it. That's the portable babysitter. That is the distractor. That's why the iPad's there, is to distract the kid. The kid doesn't have to learn to self-soothe. The kid doesn't have a chance to have a thought of their own. No imagination. No wonder they don't know what they want to be when they grow up. No imagination. Piaget, famous child psychologist of the ancient times, once said that play is the work of the child. Well, boredom is the opportunity of the child. And our children are never bored. And it's playing out now. So there's also an incredibly, I guess, amazing aspect of a child being able to just parse the internet for whatever knowledge they want to obtain. So there's this incredible amount of... You look at a community that wasn't able to talk to each other or they didn't have internet infrastructure, then they gain internet infrastructure and then they're able to communicate with each other and then that does so many beneficial things for that community to flourish on the planet. And then there's a child that has this potentially... Yes, there's this detriment of being so immersed in an iPad that they're not able to maybe find some sort of other meaning or fulfillment in their childhood. So there's this extremely nuance. Now, I want to know between those two sides, tell us about some of the nuance that you found to be interesting on the positive, on the negative, for children, for adults, wherever you think's important to discuss. Well, I want to start by saying that I think I am part of the absolute oldest cohort of people who grew up with the internet and modern computers truly from the beginning. I started using the internet when I was two years old in 1995. I'm 24 now. And interestingly in my life, the internet has played a huge role. It's done a lot of positive things. I learned a lot on the internet. I was extremely addicted to reading about interesting topics that I was learning about both in school and outside of school. So it had an indelibly positive impact on my life. However, over the past few years, I started to recognize that what has once started as a healthy habit and behavior had migrated and become an unhealthy addiction. And interestingly enough, one thing I wanted to ask the panel about was this whole premise of our talk is about the attention economy, and I'm really curious about how that fits in with this whole paradigm of addiction and mental health issues that we're currently experiencing. So one thing that I thought was really fascinating about my own experience with internet addiction and with a lot of people I actually spoke with was people were addicted to things like Facebook and Twitter. I think everyone here probably recognizes that those things can be addictive. However, a lot of people who I know are also addicted to Wikipedia, which is this repository of knowledge. It's a non-profit. Is that a bad thing? Well, that's the thing. So I was completely addicted to Wikipedia. I read literally thousands of articles, spent literally thousands of hours doing it. Started using it in 2004, like a year after it was founded. So very, very early, learned probably just as much there as I did in school, to be honest. And however, over the last year, I realized that I was spending hours and hours on Wikipedia and not actually really learning anything. And I actually realized that I was no longer coming to Wikipedia for the information. I was coming there because I felt compelled to scroll through each page and I was actually rereading articles that I had already read ten times before, just purely out of a compulsion. So it was really no longer serving any sort of purpose. It was really just a habit and behavior in and of itself that was perpetuating itself. So I think that these sort of things can begin healthy and positive and eventually transition and become negative and actually detrimental to your life. So how much do you think that this stuff, so with Wikipedia in particular, I think it's really interesting that it's nonprofit. How much of these problems do you think are actually caused by the profit motive of these companies making a lot of technology and how much of it do you think is caused by other factors or maybe just the way humans inherently use technology? I'll address your question, but first I think there's an elephant in the room that we have to clear first. We've been throwing this term around up here, addiction, internet addiction. Who here believes in internet addiction? Why? How can it be addictive? It's not a drug. All right, so you have to understand the definition of addiction. So once upon a time, the DSM, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which comes out every 20 years, in 1993, the DSM IV defined addiction as two phenomena, tolerance and withdrawal. Now it turns out, tolerance is the down-regulation of dopamine receptors in an area of the brain called the reward center of the nucleus accumbens. When those neurons start to die, that's called addiction, and dopamine is an excitatory neurotransmitter, kills neurons. Chronic excess dopamine leads to neuronal cell death. Sorry, chronic excess dopamine leads to neuronal cell death. Now, for cocaine, for heroin, for nicotine, for alcohol, even for sugar, which is how I got my start in this whole business, people are very understanding of this concept of addiction, but it was because of the withdrawal. You needed the tolerance and withdrawal. So withdrawal turns out our systemic effects of all of these drugs. So opioids have effects on the GI tract and on your lacrimal glands. Cocaine has effects on your adrenergic system, et cetera, et cetera. Caffeine, you know, the jitters, the DTs for alcohol. So everyone could see or experience the systemic effects of withdrawal of any given substance. So it's easy to call substance as addictive, but what about behaviors? There's no substance. There's no withdrawal. But we know they're addictive because the same phenomenon is going on in the brain and it's causing the same cell death. It just doesn't have the systemic effects because there's no drug. So in 2013, the DSM-5 redefined addiction as tolerance and dependence. Well, Will, you just described tolerance and dependence. So in fact, it is addiction under the new rubric, under the new definition. You have to understand that because there are a lot of you techies out there who are very willing to buy into this notion that this is just habit, not addiction. It is. And when you understand that and you understand why and you understand the neuroscience behind it, then you can get on board and you can't get on board until you understand that. Yeah, get past me. So the topic of behavioral addiction is a really hot one and really debated actually. And I think I appreciate what you're saying and for the sake of nuance, I think there are a couple of things that are worth pointing out. One difference is it's easy to equate something like cocaine to internet addiction. And when you follow neuroscience press coverage, you're constantly seeing these studies that cheese activates the same neurons in your brain as cocaine. So cheese addiction is just like doing a line. And yes, you know it's true. And the reason it's true is because all of these circuits in our brain are reused and used over and over again for all kinds of processes in our life, right? So you mentioned that none of us have a job drinking alcohol, right? But we all eat, right? And so we all actually do have to go through life engaging at least three times a day with these substances that trigger these reward systems in our brain. One important thing that's different about chemical addiction versus something like the internet is that the chemicals like cocaine are actually driving your brain outside of its biological parameters. So they're flooding your receptors. They're causing the release of neurotransmitters to a level that actually is not biologically normal. And that's actually part of why you have these pathological effects. Amphetamine actually reverses the transporters in the membranes of the cells. So instead of taking up neurotransmitters that are releasing them. And so that leads to down-regulation of receptors. It can also lead to cell death. But there's actually, I would say it's worth remembering that that's not the same process that's happening when you have a behavioral reward which is actually what our brains are designed to do. So in a sense, this is taking a natural process and it's just kind of like, you know, when a bright light or some loud noise happens it can't help but look at it. But you know, think of that happening a thousand times, right? So I think it's important to think of it that way. I don't actually believe in a sharp line between habit and addiction. I think these things, there's a spectrum. So if you look at, say, Charles Duig's book, The Power of Habit, he describes the circuit. So there's the trigger which, you know, like the itch. And there's the action which is like the scratch. And you know, then you get a reward for it even if it's sometimes, it seems negative, there's still a reward like head picking, okay? I mean, that would seem extraordinarily negative but what it's doing is it's ameliorating and inhibiting chronic anxiety and stress. So you're still receiving a reward but it's the same every time you do it. That's called a habit. The difference between habit and addiction is that the reward is variable. And that's in Nirayal's book, how to formulate habit. It certainly creates a much stronger conditioning when the reward is variable, unpredictable. So you want a variable reward? Here it is right here, okay? Because when that email goes off, you don't know if it's good or bad. It's the lottery. It's the slot machine. You've got a slot machine in your pocket. And any of you have ever gone to Las Vegas or Tunica and watched people mindlessly pour quarters into a slot machine, you know what's going on in their brains just by looking at them. Well, guess what? Going on in yours too. You can almost... The varied reward increases the likelihood of addiction? Yeah, and varied and unpredictable. Yeah, so you'll find the rats will press, you know, if they know that every time they hit the lever, they'll get a pellet. They'll actually, they'll feel kind of confidence or security, right? So anytime I want a pellet, I'll just hit the lever, right? But if they don't know how many presses it's going to take, then they'll sit there frantically pressing it because they don't know, you know, maybe it'll be this time, but who knows how long it's going to be. So I better get on that. That's kind of the mechanism underlying that. Yeah. Wow, they have neuroscience of addiction. Sam? Anybody familiar with dopamine labs? Mm-hmm. Okay, it's an L.A. company. Okay, designed to take your app and make it addictive by introducing variable reward. That's how you take any app and make it. But what if it's learning? What if it's learning? I know that, you know, there are certain ways to learn that are obsessive like you are saying, but then there's also ways to learn as though you can make a learning app addictive and it can make a multidisciplinary kid out of technology. It's possible. Yeah, excuse me. So, yeah, just hitting some of the positive tennis balls back every once in a while. Yeah, that's one of the tricky things. We put something out there and any actor can use it for whatever intentions they have. What was coming up for me during this last pack and forth was the Marshall McLuhan quote we were talking about before. 60, 70 years ago, once we have surrendered our nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who seek to profit off our senses, we really don't have many rights left. And I think a negative nuance that is seldom named is the effect on our nervous system, our breath. I think it's probably the biggest, yeah, like you wake up, you're on these things, and it's just a constant state of shortened breath, spiked heart rate, and that leads to chronic illness. And honestly, as a developer who's trying to reimagine how can smartphones support our mental health and well-being, I want to throw a hackathon where we just figure out all the ways your phone could get you to breathe more and better. That's one of the most important things that we've lost, maybe something that we never really knew how to do, but is really in jeopardy right now and is causing lots of problems. I'm very curious how much of that jeopardy is being caused by the profit motive of these companies creating this technology. I mean, I think one thing that's gotten a lot of flack recently is the ad-based revenue model where companies try to make you use their product as much as possible for as long as possible because they can show you more advertisements. However... But if it's a meditation app, then what's wrong with that? But also, in addition to that, there seems to be some things that are not designed with that motive, and yet they're still really addictive to certain people. So it's a question of what's really causing this addiction, what's causing this mental behavior. Clearly, that's also contributing to it, the profit motive of these companies, but there might be something more than that. There's a great point about the nervous system. I totally see that and feel it. It's a sense of tension in so many ways and not a sense of heart coherence and resonance. We're not running around. We're running around in our heads more, I think, because of technology in some ways. When your child's born with an iPad, rather than your child's born, we're looking at the eyes of other humans more often. I think there's less heart intention there. Max, can I go to the... Can I move on? You even want to say something? So this is bringing up for me a memory that I have of my own situation, but one thing that I would... Maybe this is slightly moving on, so it might be the right time to say this to bring this up, but gaming, right? So computer gaming, I think, is one of the early places where we saw a lot of companies refining the ways in which they're developing addictive technologies. This variable reward system was used in gaming for a long time, where you'd kill the monster and then occasionally it would drop something that you'd want and occasionally it wouldn't. It was definitely refined there very well. You went from the slot machine right into the gaming world. However, I also want to... I don't know if this is an optimistic tone or a deeply cynical one. Maybe I'm not sure you guys can tell me, but there are many people for whom... So I used to play World of Warcraft a lot when I was younger. So full reveal here. We're on the couches. This is the right place to talk about it. But in college, I think I spent as much time playing World of Warcraft as I did actually doing legitimate work in school. I spent more time playing video games. There you go. Well, who knows where I would be, right? But I rose in the World of Warcraft world. I became a guild leader and I had all these... I ran 100 people in my guild and we did this great stuff and blah, blah, blah. But I remember a lot of the people who were playing that game who I knew and who I got to know through there, it's not like they had these amazing lives and if only they hadn't been playing World of Warcraft, they would have been curing cancer or up on this stage or something. They often had what I would categorize as very mundane, boring jobs. They weren't enjoying their daily... They would go through their job basically just well enough to be able to pay the internet bill and to pay the World of Warcraft monthly subscription fee, get home, and now they'd be slaying dragons. They'd be consorting with all of the interesting people in the community and doing all these things. There was an addictive component to it but there was also a sense in which it gave them meaning, identity, and purpose and perhaps meaning, identity, and purpose that they wouldn't otherwise have had in their lives. I know it gave me a sense of meaning, identity, and purpose in a time of my life when I felt like I was just some college student, just some number and I found it enjoyable. So maybe I was partly addicted or whatever but I was also deriving some of these benefits. So was I wrong to be deriving these benefits? Should I still be locked in a basement somewhere playing World of Warcraft all day rather than being up here? And what is the effect of technologies like indistinguishable virtual realities? What is the effect of technology that puts us in a world that we prefer to be in virtually rather than in the real world once it gets so good? So what do we do with the essence of finding meaning in virtual worlds rather than finding meaning in our real world? And who are we to say that, you know, those of us who are, you know, most of the people in this room, I'm sure many of us are quite successful, you know, are up on this stage, we're in the Bay Area, et cetera, et cetera. Who are we to say that their lives are, you know, that the fact that they're sitting on Facebook all day or that they're playing World of Warcraft all day? Well, that's a meaningless existence. That's not what the kind of world that we want to live. Robert's got some thoughts. I'm sure, I'm sure, you know, all right. I'm teeing it up for you here, Robert. So I'll let you go ahead. I'm not going to tell you that it's a meaningless or a meaningful existence. That's not the issue. The issue is, is it addicting you or is it depressing you? Because it's doing one or the other or both. They can't be doing neither? Zuckerberg says, he's on, you know, you can quote me because I'm quoting him, depressed people use Facebook because they're looking for social validation that they can't get anywhere else. Whether you use, do it with World of Warcraft or, you know, anything or any other, you know, device or method, you know, we used to have Trekkies when I was a kid. You know, that was the early version. I'm one of those too, I'll admit. Yeah, all right, fine. Well, never mind. Checking all the boxes, fine. You know, he says, depressed people use Facebook because they're looking for social validation. Except for one thing, when you look at the time lag analysis data, it doesn't matter if you're depressed when you start or whether you're, you know, not depressed when you start, if you're perfectly happy. Everyone gets more depressed using Facebook. We have the data that actually shows when you do the time lag analysis, everyone becomes more depressed. And the reason is because Facebook ups your dopamine. Well, guess what? As it ups your dopamine, it downs your serotonin because everything that ups your dopamine downs your serotonin. As a poll of the audience, does anybody feel as though their happiness just like continues and continues to increase as they use a social platform? Does that, does it feel, yeah? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, tell us. I'm gonna go out on a limb here. In college, Facebook was my world of Warcraft. I had really unhealthy dependency on it and it distracted me from studies and probably all sorts of other things. And then through this digital wellness journey, largely self-directed and now also empowered by new tools and communication contracts and things, I think I have a much healthier relationship with the product, which is an extremely powerful tool for organizing and connecting with people, putting your intentions and ask out there and inviting them to support. It's insane. And I've noticed a lot more over the last year that it seems like a lot of people who seem to move effortlessly through the world are really skilled at using Facebook in a grounded, balanced way. We're not necessarily teaching people how to do that. Facebook is not necessarily training you how to do it and it requires some hacks and workarounds, but... Nobody's telling you, teaching you how to not reply to a message so that you can continue focusing on your project that you're working on. Yeah, there's that component of it too. It's, these things are complicated. Yeah, yeah. I want, we'll have Q&A, yes, yes, correct. Just on this note, there's an increasing amount of evolutionary ties to what's going on as we've been talking about. There's an evolutionary hypothesis called the show-off hypothesis that you would come back to your village with either a lot of berries or a lot of meat or whatever it may be, new items, new tools, and your fellow villagers would be very excited and they'd be very happy for the village and then you would get upranked in the social clout of the village. And similarly, you post onto the social platforms to get upranked by your village of humans in order for your clout to rise. And then there's other aspects to this which is now the voices is very strange in terms of having lots of, having lots of noise and having less signal. I can't tell if there is a lower signal to noise ratio now than there was 50 years ago before all of the computer and internet age. I'm curious if you think the signal to noise ratio has decreased, if so, why? And furthermore, what are the social network 2.0s, like what SIEMPO is doing in many ways, like what the ethical tech research that's being done, like civility is doing as well. How does signal to noise, where do you think about that and then also what do you think about the social network 2.0s, mindfulness and emotional health as well along the way? So I personally think that when it comes to social networks 2.0, I think a lot of people hear this and they think, oh, it's going to be like Facebook but with ethics, so it'll be an ethical version of Facebook. And in my opinion, I do not believe that a social network 2.0 is going to look anything like what we currently conceive of as a social network because I think that the reasons why people say they use social networks are actually different than the reasons that they actually use social networks and I think a lot of people who think, oh, I'm going to create Facebook 2.0 but I'm not going to steal people's privacy, private data, I'm not going to add them to Facebook. They think that people are going to Facebook to connect with their friends and share important information in their lives when they're actually going to Facebook to procrastinate and look at pictures of people they find really attractive and feel very outraged to stimulate their adrenaline by reading posts that make them feel really upset and angry. I think people who go into the social network 2.0 paradigm think, oh, I'm going to help people connect with their friends ethically but they don't realize that maybe the actual reasons people use Facebook are different than what we often think they are. What do you think about the signal to noise being lower now than it was 50 years ago? What do you think about that? Well, where do you stand on it? Do you have a thought about it? So signal to noise just to make sure I'm understanding it correctly. So signal is like the importance of content or the actual relevance of it and then noise is just the things that are... So I think the signal to noise ratio has definitely decreased a lot or namely there's a lot more noise than signal than there used to be and that's because media itself is proliferated into a thousand different modes of communication whereas in the past it was very, very consolidated with just a couple kind of monopolistic forms of communication. In addition to that, media now is really in the hands of everyone. Everyone can create a Facebook post and in the past only a few people could create a TV channel and broadcast their message that way. And if you look at the amount of information that the average person is exposed to it's drastically increased over the last 50 years or really for actually hundreds of years but in the last 50 years it's been really exponentially a lot. I'm going to go out on a limb here. You were asking about the signal to noise. If the noise is being interpreted as the signal my argument would be that you don't know what the signal is and the reason is because the entire United States and really the whole world has actually lost sight of what the purpose is. There are two different phenomena. One's called pleasure, one's called happiness. They are not the same. There are seven differences between pleasure and happiness. Pleasure is short lived, happiness is long lived. Pleasure is visceral, you feel it in your body. Happiness is ethereal, you feel it above the neck. Pleasure is taking, happiness is giving. Pleasure is experienced alone. Happiness is usually experienced in social groups. Pleasure is achievable with substances. Happiness is not achievable with substances. The extremes of pleasure whether it be substances or behaviors all lead to addiction. Happiness is a holic after every one of them. Whether it's sex a holic, alcoholic, chocolate holic, shop a holic but there's no such thing as being addicted to too much happiness. And finally, pleasure is dopamine, happiness is serotonin. Not the same. My argument is that we've lost sight of the difference because we've been told for the last 50 years that pleasure is happiness. The noise became the signal. Yeah, so I think what you're saying, yeah we use the terms eudaimonia sometimes. Eudaimonia is what Aristotle referred to as contentment. Right. The feeling of this feels good, I don't want or need anymore compared to say reward which is this feels good, I want more. Right. They are not the same. So yeah, so then there's satisfaction with a life well lived is a really different experience than the momentary of experience of pleasure and it's really important to think about that in terms of how these systems are designed and what they are supporting. So my thought about signal to noise is really to think about what is the signal, what is the signal that we want these systems to be carrying. I actually think right now. Great question. Thanks. So I actually think it's possible right now to construct a system. This is something I put time into at various times. How can I build my digital environment so that the signal it carries is one that's positive. So I have at various times spent time really tailoring like my Facebook news feed to really carry the things I care about and to filter out the things. Things that I think support my, you call it happiness versus pleasure, right? Yeah. But you also have to be careful because you want to balance you. Not necessarily the things that make me feel great, right? At the same time. But the things that when I step back I think this is going to help me be a better person. So I want content that really helps me think about, like learn about how to work out better, right? Get nudges to go running in the morning, right? I can set up my phone right now. If I'm very careful, I can set up my phone to do that. But by default, if I don't, if I just take it as it comes and then I install the apps and use all the default settings, that is not what I get. So I think that is a real, one of the real challenges that is really important and necessary if we're not, if these devices are going to be something that's compatible with happiness in a life well lived. I think stewardship is a good one. I think learning to feel, feeling, feeling yourself, feeling your heart, feeling other people, feeling a broad range of emotion. These are the things that I would call signal. And if you could somehow deliver stewardship of Earth and stewardship of civilization to other people as signal through technology, I think that's a great use of technology. Great. Yeah, I love it. And I actually just had one more thought. So thank you for giving me a second. So when I started graduate school, one of the first issues we were presented with was actually a crisis in the mental health care delivery system. And that crisis is that we have, as it's structured now, we're fundamentally unable to deliver enough treatment to reach everybody in the world who needs, you know, as Robert mentioned, we have, you know, 4% of the world. How many therapists do you think that that takes to see somebody for an hour a week, all those people, you know, minimum of 10 to 12 sessions? You literally, we could train, you know, almost the whole country, and it takes, you know, it took eight years for me to finish, you know, to get trained up in neuroscience and all of those. That's like 300 million people. Right? Yeah. Yeah, so literally, you know, so the math has been done and it's just mathematically not possible, let alone financially. So how are we going to actually address the scale of the mental health problems that some of the, you know, the pre-date, this is not all due to technology, but we already had these issues and now they're being exacerbated too. So the same thing that's the problem when I started grad school was actually, we were seeing it as the answer. I was really excited about the potential, especially for smartphones, to actually reach people at scale and actually provide potentially an answer to this problem. So what's been amazing is to see how quickly that vision has kind of, the dark side of it has taken over just in the last few years. But, you know, the, in terms of the signal, you know, for us in mental health, these devices are actually one of our also, simultaneously one of our only, one of the only hopes we have for actually addressing this problem at scale. So we really need them to carry this signal. Tristan Harris did a quick search of the happiest apps and the most unhappy apps. I'm just going to read you the list of both real quick. And keep the mic close. Most happy apps. Ready? Calm, Google Calendar, Headspace, Inside Timer, The Weather, My Fitness Pal, Audible, Waze, Amazon Music, Podcasts, Kindle, Evernote, Spotify, Weather, Canvas. That sounds about right. Yeah. So what do all of those have in common? No. About tuning inward for a lot of them. They're one way apps. The app goes from the app to you. Now let's look at the most unhappy apps. Oh, interesting, the app to you. Yeah. Yeah, to you. Yeah. Now the most unhappy apps. Ready? Grindr, Candy Crush Saga, Facebook, WeChat, Candy Crush, Reddit, Tweetbot, Webo, Tinder, Subway Surf, 2Dots, Instagram, Snapchat, 1010, and Clash Royale. What do those have in common? They're two-way apps. The problem is, who are you two-waying with? Random people. Random people, mostly anonymous. So my question is, can you connect with anonymous? You know, Zuckerberg says, we connect people. That's not connection. It's connectivity, but it's not connection. Connection is eye-to-eye, face-to-face connection. And there's a reason that it's got to be eye-to-eye, face-to-face. You have a set of neurons in the back of your head in your occipital lobe called mirror neurons. You can record from them. And what they're doing is they're reading the facial expressions of the person you're talking to in real time. And they are basically transducing that facial expression into emotion that you then adopt. And we have a name for this process. It's called empathy. And if you can't do it, you are a psychopath. Think about it. So some of the technology that we are building is causing a decrease in empathy, therefore an increase in psychopathy. Absolutely. And that cell phone in your pocket? 40% less empathy because it's in your pocket. So Robert, let me ask you a question. How good would technology have to get before we're able to achieve that level of connection with somebody who's not physically present with us? Hell if I know. Like the matrix kind of levels? Yeah, I don't know. Let me move conversation on to before we get to Q&A. There's a really pressing point that I want to talk about. I want to talk about the end of privacy because it looks like we're leaving privacy completely behind. We're using... We want the Google Maps data, therefore we contribute to the Google Maps data. We want the benefits of these products, therefore we contribute with our data of these products. So if we're going to be in a place where we are completely decentralizing our data and all data is decentralized and it can be anonymous and it can be helpful, this is some magical land of possibility that I'm envisioning. Hopefully, hopefully. Then there's another darker side load data being manipulated, all this different type of stuff. What are your thoughts on... And also along with the end of privacy, where does geopolitics sit with the end of privacy? There is a massive arms race for data going on. So if you stop collecting data because you're like, I want to do this differently and then China or Russia or wherever else in the world continues to collect as much data as possible and make their algorithms better, make their AIs better, where do we go? What are your thoughts on privacy and geopolitics? It's easy, you just whip up an answer right on the spot. So this really comes back to the attention economy. I mean, it really is how much... I mean, it sounds to me like you're kind of taking a geopolitical bend to this. I personally believe that at this point the bigger geopolitical factor that's also a little more relevant to what we're talking about now is just capitalism kind of having a stranglehold on the political processes around the world. You even see this in China. China is a de jure communist nation that is de facto completely capitalist at this point. I mean, they have stock market crashes and everything. It would have been unimaginable 40 years ago. So as a result, this is really a question of if the attention economy is really behind all these issues or if it's actually something deeper and more fundamental with human psychology and its inability to handle these new technologies that we have. I think if it's the first thing, the attention economy really kind of causing all these problems in and of itself that's probably easier to address than the latter scenario where it really is just something about our minds are not equipped to handle the accessibility of information that has been given to us through computers and smartphones. I can throw in one little quick plug here for capitalism though. I think capitalism will give us what we want. Not necessarily what we say we want, but what a lot of people seem to deep down inside for whatever reason that we may or may not approve of seem to want. So I feel that it's, like you were saying before, it's our responsibility and it's a responsibility a lot of people who care about this subject to teach people that what they think they might want in the short term might not be very healthy for them in the long term. Similarly to what has been done with a lot of other horrible and distasteful addictive substances in the past is to understand how to use them in moderation where you can and to abstain from them where you can't seem to use them in moderation. But it's up to us to do that, to teach that, and then to change the underlying demand in the population at large from what it currently is to something that we perhaps feel is a better in the long run. Do you think that the things that people desire are inherently kind of virtuous or do you think they inherently desire procrastination and piddling through life with a bunch of kind of boredom satisfying programs? I think we have both. I think as humans we are always torn between these two poles and we should do our best to help people to feel like they're able to satisfy a little bit of those dopamine hits a little bit of those more primal instincts while doing something that is in the long run potentially what they themselves would say that they would want to do in the long run if only they have the right tools, the right services, the right companies, the right technologies providing it for them. And I'm going to tell you you're full of crap. Both of you. And the reason is because education alone has not solved any substance of abuse or behavior of abuse and it's not going to. That's why it's abused. That's why it's addictive because you can know that whatever substance you're addicted to is ruining your health, your family, your economy, your society, your community and you are powerless to do anything about it. And that's what the data show. It shows that every single substance and every single behavior has required some form of societal intervention. Whether it be alcohol, the Gin Act of 1736, whether it be tobacco, whether it be methamphetamine, whether it be cocaine, whether it be heroin, whether it be gambling. It doesn't matter. Rehab and laws. Rehab, personal intervention, laws, societal intervention. Rehab and laws, rehab and laws. What is your solution? And there are no laws for technology. Can Robert give a solution, please, on what you think would be a good solution to the Internet addiction one here on a societal level? It's not education. Well, so how to, you know, the genie is out of the bottle. It's not like we're going back and I'm not sure we should go back. I mean, technology ultimately is a tool. It can be for good or for bad. The question is how do you make it, quote, humane? And, you know, the Center for Humane Technology, which Will belongs to, I'm an advisor to, are trying to engage developers in figuring out how to do those things. I think ultimately there probably will be ways, and I'm not a techie, so, you know, I'm a technological Luddite. I really, you know, that's not my thing. My issue is the neuroscience. I think there ultimately will be ways. There are things that will, you know, maybe it'll be limitation of access. Maybe there'll be specific, you know, dampers on reward or profit. Maybe the business model will change so that it will actually pay business developers to promote something that works for the good rather than for the bad. As an example, you know, I'm the anti-sugar guy. You know, why don't we subsidize real food and tax process food and use the money from the tax to fund the subsidy? Then it would all of a sudden be in big food's best interest to do the right thing instead of the wrong thing. Ultimately I think we can provide incentives to make developers want to do the right thing, but we can't do it using the current business model, which is eyeballs. Okay, as long as it's about eyeballs, you can't win. Maybe it'll be subscription model. You know, maybe people will, you know, like cigarettes, you know, you gotta pay a lot, you know, and make it hurt. You know, maybe that'll be the way. There'll be, you know, some method for doing it, but the current method clearly does not work. I have to respond to this a little bit, though. I have to expel some of the crap that was coming up. So, I don't mean to say that teaching is the right solution here, right? So if somebody were to have come to me when I was playing World of Warcraft in college and said, look, by the way, this is probably not gonna be that helpful for you 10 years down the line. It feels really good today, but really, although side note, I got my first job by telling somebody I ran a World of Warcraft Guild, so, you know, there's that. But I think that the reason that I got off of it and the other people who I saw who were addicted to the game, frankly, stopped playing it was not because anybody told them to. It wasn't because Blizzard raised the subscription price of World of Warcraft by five-fold, right? It wasn't because a regulator came in and said, Blizzard Entertainment, that's the company that makes World of Warcraft. We need you guys to stop using variable rewards. That's just not gonna work here. That wasn't it at all. It was just that in their lives they found other things, including myself, that I felt were more meaningful than the time I was spending in World of Warcraft. And I think for a lot of people, their lives are... They don't have access to that ability to get meaning and purpose from something else in their lives. And I feel like in terms of innovators, in terms of technologists, that's one of the ways in which we could really work to address the problem of giving people alternatives that we feel fulfill them, gives them that meaning and purpose in their life and doesn't do it in a way that is ultimately self-destructive. So that's, at least personally, that's my approach, right? With civility, I feel like this is the ultimate in giving people that ability to engage intellectually, which is deep in fulfilling face-to-face because I'm not getting that fulfillment from... I personally wasn't getting that fulfillment from all the other ways in life that social interactions through Facebook, et cetera. And I hope that other people feel the same way. And it's through having these alternatives that people will migrate off, or at least many people will migrate off of these less healthy forms of engagement. And may we just come back to good, good, great points there. May we come back to end of privacy and geopolitics, thoughts on that on the... please. Yeah, there's so many directions to go in. And it's making me appreciate that you all brought this together because it is such a multifaceted, complicated question that we're trying to answer. Like, how do we make this all work with our systems and our personalities? I'm hopeful that social networks 2.0 includes more human connection. I'm hopeful that... I'm hopeful that nation-states start to collaborate in the face of potential self-termination. I mean, on the way here, the worst air quality on Earth right now is right outside our door. Yeah, the wake-up calls getting louder. And I'm really inspired to see lots of people starting to think a lot more radically about different ways of being with each other, with technology, with the environment, with themselves. And, yeah, in this day and age, I don't think it's enough for companies just to be mission-driven. I think we really need to be questioning every aspect of what we're doing in order to create the beautiful world that we actually want to live in. And so, yeah, I'm hopeful that this awareness grows globally, that millennials coming into power can signal to each other that this is something we value as a people. This is something that we care about. We want to fund learning outcomes to understand and make that transparent. So we're all on the same team here on Spaceship Earth trying to make it work together. It's really forcing us to evolve as a species. And so I'm excited that where we are is really an epicenter of experimentation and debate and solidarity. Joe, we haven't heard from you in a bit. Sure, so my area is not geopolitics and privacy laws. But when I look at that level and the systems of what are happening, there's an addiction, I think, that we go totally untreated in a capitalist system. And two, really, those are addictions to wealth and power. And I call them addictions because they are unhealthy. Megalomania. So we know that life satisfaction has no relationship to income above a basic level of meeting your needs. Right, that's the number you often hear, right? And so beyond that, what are you actually doing? What are you trying to accomplish? You're actually making your life better. But your brain, just like we get pulled into games, like we get pulled into substances, like we get pulled into Facebook, your brain is telling you, yeah, make that next million and you're going to feel better. Things are going to be better. And guess what? It's not. And guess what people do then? Well, the one million didn't help, maybe two million, maybe ten, maybe a billion. What if you give that money to people like artists and entrepreneurs around the world? Right. And it turns out, you see a few people realizing this. You see Warren Buffett realizing this. And Bill Gates, some of these people are realizing it, at least to some extent. They obviously got to where they got by being pulled into this. But I think if this was something, if I had a megaphone and I could kind of broadcast something across the world, it would be that we really need to take this seriously and start really talking about the fact that we're not building a society that works for anybody. If we just allow these forces to, and we kind of idealize them and allow them to go unchecked. And that's kind of my hope for the world is that people, because otherwise these people are going to continue to just try to grab every dollar they can and try to get control of everything they can. But the way that we can unhook this is to understand that actually, you know, it's a society that's better for everyone if we build it in a different way. Yeah, that's great. That's great. Yeah, that's pretty damn good in terms of the conversation. I feel pretty good ending there. I feel like we know that there needs to be some sort of change. And I think we're beautifully growing through that change right now. Although Robert at times is like, ah! Yeah, yeah, I feel you, I feel you. May we, let's give our panel a round of applause please. Alright, we got some time for Q&A. We'd love to open up the floor.