 Hello Simon, good to meet you. I've actually watched quite a few of your videos. My name's Andre, I write for a magazine in Canada. No, it's actually it's been it's been edifying, it's been it's been very it especially in the area of you know managing social media engagement and that sort of thing so it's been helpful. Okay, great, great. I've been a fan of yours for a while because I purchased the I've been looking at stuff a lot years ago. You said that big package of TV. You sound like a bunch of liability lawyers about to sue me for multiple offenses. Video, I bought your book. Okay, let's say you know let's have a class action lawsuit and settle this. But I know who you are but if you could explain to who you are for people who are listening, what your different interests and expertise are. I know who I am. So that's isn't this the key question for everyone? Who am I? But if you're talking about my biography is distinct from my essence. So I'm a professor of psychology in several universities. I'm also a physicist. I have multiple PhDs and so on. I'm a physicist. I have a PhD in philosophy. I'm a medical doctor but a non-practicing one. I lecture on psychiatry and neuroscience. And in my other head, I'm a professor of finance in several universities. So this is my portfolio of things. I've written 60 odd books last count and published well over 2000 articles. So I've been busy. I think I've always been interested in your writings on narcissism and personality disorders and your videos. But you recently started talking about another topic that I've been really interested in which is the effects of social media. And I can give my own personal experience is I've had trouble with being addicted to social media where I've gotten myself off of Twitter for the most part recently just because I was constantly feeling tense all the time. And I started finding videos from you about the topic. It was really interesting because you were saying a lot of the things that I was feeling. And one of the things that really stuck to me was that this integration of truth, when you know who no one is, you don't know who the person is on the other side. You're inundated with information constantly and you lose track of what's real and what's not. And things are always going viral. And one thing that was interesting about your videos was how much of it you say is by design. And I kind of wanted to talk about that, about where you think things have started and where you think they're going as far as with social media. Well, first of all, it's a fact. It is by design. The former chief engineer of Google, former chief engineer of Facebook and so on so forth. They're both testified in the Senate, outside. They granted interviews. It's all available online. It's you don't need to rely on me or anything. I see and they've admitted that they have designed the interface with conditioning and addiction in mind. They don't call it conditioning and they don't call it addiction. Obviously they're using it terms such as stickiness or, you know, interaction or whatever, but they're talking about conditioning and addiction. Now, there's a distinction, a difference between conditioning and addiction conditioning is when you would like, you would like to you, you, you are aware of what you're doing, but you wouldn't. You would not like to break it off. Addiction is when you are aware of what you're doing, but it's ego dystonic, you would like to break it off, but you're unable to. And both features exist on social media. Social media plays mainly with what we call relative positioning. Relative positioning is is constant and instant comparison to your peers or to others which you deem to be peers in some way, shape or form or aspect or respect. So it could be socioeconomic peers. It could be educational peers. It could be anything. The moment you decide to someone or something is your reference group. From that moment on, you begin an unconscious and later conscious process of comparison and the softwares that underlie social media, the platforms. They encourage this comparison in myriad ways, the most famous of which is the like, the like, the number of the shares, the number of times something is referred to. The problem is that, one, this creates, as I've just said, conditioning in certain people. Certain people who actually enjoy this because they're getting narcissistic supply. It caters to their narcissism. Attention regulates their internal environment so they crave attention. So these people would be conditioned. They would not be able to stop even if they wanted to and they don't want to. And then there's a second group of people who get addicted. They would have liked to stop some of them try to go to go dry, you know, to go sober for for a month or two off social media, but they simply can't keep coming back for more. So these two groups are generated by the by the platform. And then the problem is that the comparison is not only with others, which one might say has a redeeming feature. It creates social interactions. You could say, So what's wrong with comparing myself to others? It means that I'm interacting with others. It means that I'm in touch with others. It means that I listen to others, other people's opinions. So it's not all bad. Well, true. There is a redeeming feature there, although actually studies have shown that this leads to silos to confirmation bias. In other words, like-minded people tend to congregate and augment and enhance each other's prejudices. But still, it's still a social function. But where the problem starts is you begin to compete with yourself, not with others. Yesterday you made a post. You received 100 likes. Today you make a post. You receive 50 likes. What's your inner critic tells you? You've done something wrong. You screwed up. Yesterday you got 100 likes. Today you got 50 likes. You're a failure. You're a defeat. Something's wrong with you. So these platforms encourage what Freud originally 100 years ago called the super ego. And today we call the inner critic, the negative introjects, the negative voices inside your head. Some of these voices belong to bad parents, narcissistic, selfish, unpredictable, capricious parents. Other such voices belong to teachers, peers, and so on. But they are negative. So these negative introjects, they're usually dormant and social media platforms provoke these voices, stimulate them, and it becomes a cacophony inside your head. This is precisely the reason why numerous studies have linked beyond any doubt the usage of social media to a dramatic explosion, a pandemic, a veritable pandemic in anxiety disorders and depression, especially among two age groups up to age 25 and above age 65. These are two vulnerable groups. People under age 25 and above 65 who use social media platforms show a marked increase in anxiety disorders and depression. And we are not talking like a 10% increase. We are talking about five times more, five times the original prevalence of anxiety disorders and three times more depression, three times more like 300% increase and 500% increase. And we are talking a rise of 40% in suicide among teenagers after the year 2008 when social media platforms became ubiquitous. And again, the suicides are pretty directly linked to online bullying via social media platforms, to relative positioning, to self-defeating, self-negating thinking, automatic negative thoughts, as they're called. And all of these are provoked by social media platforms. No, social media platforms, therefore, are the equivalent, the digital equivalent of alcohol or drugs. I mean, they're bad for you. I agree with the alcohol example, because I was telling Andre the other day that, you know, some people, their response to feeling addicted to alcohol is they can do moderation, whereas some people decide they have to become teetotalers. I have to abstain. And I was telling Andre, I feel like if I do one tweet, I'm in for a penny, in for a pound, I'm just there. So I'm better off. I'm the exact same way. And I will say that when you speak of, you know, higher prevalences of anxiety and depression, you're sitting here describing me, basically. I mean, I, you know, in addition to the other disabilities that I have, two of the mental health disorders that I've been dealing with for a very long time, but I felt have been exacerbated by social media engagement, have been anxiety and depression. And as a matter of fact, a couple of weeks ago, I had to tell Trevor, I said, listen, I'm just going to log off. Like I deleted my account altogether. And then there's like articles that I publish, there's people who interview me on podcasts and so forth. And they asked like, Hey, where am I supposed to tag you? So I let my profile come back. But I don't really have any plans on engaging for the very same reason that I feel like if I, if I tweet one thing, if I say one thing, it's like somebody picking the bottle back up. And then I'll just, I'll lose track of time. It'll be like two o'clock in the morning. What happened? How did I lose all that time? All modes of communication are essentially regulated or self-regulate. You can conceive of television without regulatory bodies. You can conceive of print media. You can, I mean, communication starting with radio mass communications has always been regulated one way or another, regulated not for content, God forbid. I'm not advocating censorship, regulated for ethics, regulated for exposure, regulated for example, age limitation, et cetera, et cetera. It's extremely easy to convert social media from what it is today, which is essentially an intoxicating substance. It's extremely easy to convert it from an intoxicating substance to a medicine. For example, why not limit the usage? Why not limit you? You can't use the platform more than two hours a day. It's very easy to do programming or coding wise. Very. Why not limit certain features to certain age groups like you have to be 18 or 21 to do certain things? Why not take away all together, likes and or not take them away but not show the number? Just show this post has been liked. Why the number? The number is in order to create conditioning. Pavlov's dogs, you know? So there are features, malicious features. I'm a very, I'm an author. I use words very judiciously and I hope very responsibly. I repeat, there are malevolent malicious features in these platforms which could easily be taken away. The platforms could be tweaked, not even rewritten, not even recorded, tweaked. The platforms could be tweaked in a minor way to render them user-friendly in the truest sense, facilitators of true social interaction. For example, take the feature of friend. Why not insist on ID verification before you become a friend with someone? Numerous other platforms do this, not social media. Why not insist on this in social media? I feel like one reason, I feel like one reason why they don't want that is because there's some bad actors that they actually want to exist because it helps with their program and one of them is they know a lot of people like to make sock puppets, dummy accounts, extra accounts and that chaos for whatever reason I think helps the toxic addictive experience of it. As long as that'll make money, they'll allow you to do it. Yeah, I think, I mean, I'm not sure why you're saying we don't know the reason, we all know the reason. Monetizing eyeballs, that's the only reason. Now here's the problem with monetizing eyeballs. Everyone in this dog has been monetizing eyeballs since Marconi invented the radio. I mean television, network television and later cable TV, but more so network television and of course newspapers have been monetizing eyeballs like forever. But social media monetize eyeballs in a different way via, as I mentioned, addiction and conditioning. What does it mean? It means that social media compete for your eyeballs with other alternatives. It's not only that social media competes with television for your eyeball, for your attention. It's not only that they want you to remain glued to the screen, stickiness. It's not only this, they are competing with your spouse, they are competing with your children, they are competing with your friends and neighbors, they are competing with any other form of intimacy you may have. Your wife, if you're married, your wife is Facebook's largest enemy by far. Facebook's largest competitor is not MySpace or anything similar. Facebook's largest competitor is the wives, the spouses, the husband, the friends, the neighbors, the communities. These are Facebook's largest competitors because Facebook and similar juggernaut are ruthless. They crush this competition. You see, it's extremely simple. There's a finite amount of minutes a day. Either you give these minutes to your children or you give these minutes to Zuckerberg. It's as simple as this. Either you give your minutes to your children or you give these minutes to Facebook. No third way about it. So Facebook needs to eliminate the attention that you give to your children. They need to separate you from your children. They need to. They must do it to survive or to thrive or both. It's so extremely simple, this shocking truth that social media is an antisocial force, a social force to be more precise. It's a force that craves to atomize individuals so that they have no window to the world except via the social media platform. We've been talking about this for, I couldn't even tell you how many months. And I keep saying to you that I feel like sometimes I'm going a little bit paranoid or a little bit crazy, but because we're now in a state of quarantine, everything is locked down. We're staying home or socially distancing, isolating ourselves, etc. It's almost like it's just accelerating the negative aspects of social media that already existed. For example, you mentioned that social media atomizes us and that's absolutely true, but it's also now mediating our interpersonal communication through platforms that are designed to sell us things. So what does that mean, for example, for things like people who are trying to find relationships? Who are just trying to find meaningful relationships? Maybe it could be a romantic relationship, maybe branching out and having more friendships. There used to be a time where you would go out into your community and find people to meet with, to network with. Maybe you'd be in the same, you'd volunteer for the same causes. You might be on, let's say, like the Rotary Club or something like that, but now it seems that all of our interpersonal relationships and communications are being mediated through these platforms. Oh, I would go a lot further than this. It's not only interpersonal communication that's mediated, it's reality. Reality, the world. 46% of all news consumption today is via Facebook, not via television, not via newspapers, not via word of mouth either. 46% of all news consumed is via Facebook. That's by far the greatest news aggregator in human history. So they tell you what to know and what not to know. There's implicit censorship. It's called the algorithm. Similarly, Google News is a force to reckon with. These things are not random. They're governed by algorithms. And a good algorithm example is YouTube. People are really thinking about the social media network, but it has a lot of social media effects. And they have this autoplay algorithm that can really get you into a filter bubble that is nowhere where you started. You end up in a whole different place arguing with people and watching all types of things. Again, it's worse than this. I mean, you strike me as a perennial optimist. It's much worse than this. I have never been described as such. Add it to the class action list. The algorithm is not Google's or Facebook's. It's you. It's your reflection. In the autoplay, for example, you mentioned autoplay, YouTube. YouTube actually monitors your preferences, your previous choices and constructs an implicit profile of you. And this profile dictates the next videos that you watch. So the algorithm is you. The algorithm is protein. It shape shifts. It morphs in order to fit you like a tight clothing, like a second skin. You know, we each one of us generates a whole new medium, a whole new medium on YouTube, on Facebook, whatever. And we are actually, we end up talking to ourselves. It's totally solipsistic. We end up isolated. That's what I mean by atomization. We end up in an echo chamber, but this echo chamber is not only other like-minded people. Actually, it's not even mostly other like-minded people. It's you. You talking to yourself. Now, with your permission, I would like to elucidate a concept from narcissism, because it has to do with narcissism. Of course. In narcissism, I introduced the concept of Hall of Mirrors. I suggest that there is no such thing as a narcissist. There's nobody there. There's no entity. There's no self. Narcissism is about the fracturing, arrested development. It's about the impeding of the process of the formation of a cohesive self. Narciss does not have a self. That's the irony. He doesn't have an ego because he doesn't have an ego. It's an ego-less person, actually. Nirvana, if you wish, because the narcissist doesn't have an ego. He needs other people to fulfill his psychological functions for him. That's why the narcissist is so dependent on narcissistic supply. Narcissistic supply provides him with a reality testing, tells him what's real, what's not, and regulates his internal environment, his self-esteem, his self-confidence, sense of self-worth. He needs other people to do it for him because he is incapable to do it for himself, simply because he does not exist as a cohesive, coherent, unitary unit. Now, Hall of Mirrors. When you, people ask me all the time, how come a woman, let's say, falls in love with a narcissist? So the thing is, the narcissist provides her with a Hall of Mirrors. When she enters the narcissistic space, when she enters his soul, if you wish, whatever, she sees herself in this mirror. The process of idealization, idealizing the partner, is presenting the partner with a mirror, a carnival mirror, which distorts the partner into an idealized figure. It's irresistible. That's why partners of narcissists can't break up with narcissists. That is the core of trauma bonding. The partner sees herself in the Hall of Mirror that is the narcissist. And the self that the partner sees, I'm assuming, is the false self. Either an idealized or a despised false self that the narcissist is too... And she falls in love with herself, not with a narcissist. She falls in love with the way that the narcissist sees her. And now this is exactly social media. Social media makes you fall in love with yourself because you keep hearing confirmation, you keep being confirmed. It's irresistible to be constantly confirmed. The algorithm subtly tells you, wow, you're a genius. You're right. You're not wrong. You're perfect. The algorithm enhances your narcissism. Think about the autoplay. You choose a video. The next video you see is almost identical to the first video you've seen or tends to support it somehow, to buttress the message somehow. Gradually, without even noticing, you are being told that you are Godlike, that you're omniscient, that your choices are always perfect because multiple people on YouTube keep telling you this. Keep agreeing with you. Confirmation bias. You are never contradicted, never challenged with the autoplay. It's the same with Facebook. Who's going to like your posts? People who agree with you. The more they like the posts, the more convinced you are, the more convinced you become of your infallibility. You're converted from a mere mortal into the pope, infallible. I used to do a lot of, well, I still do, a lot of psychology reading, especially in narcissism. And one of the things that was unique to your book, anyone else has discussed it. I'm not aware of it, but it was very helpful to me and kind of changed how I thought of stuff, was a lot of different people like Karen Horne, for example, talks about the true self and the false self. And she broke the false self into two types, like the idealized false self, and then there's the despised false self versus the true self. And different people have different formulations of true self and false self. But when I read your book, what was interesting is, and again, if it's from somewhere else, I don't know, but you were the only person I saw who said it, you talked about an atrophy true self, where some people actually don't have a true self that they're actually hiding or suppressing because they've never developed it. It will be almost like a plant that you're growing in the dark in the back of your closet. It's getting no sun, it's getting very little food. So a lot of people don't even have a true self to recover even. They haven't been able to develop it. It's been kind of crowded out by their false selves. And to me, I feel like what you described with social media, the way it kind of feeds into your false self, it kind of grows, expands it. I feel like a lot of people, especially people who grew up with this from a very young age, are in a position where they might be getting conditioned to grow up with a neglected true self. I want to know what you thought about that. Yeah. Well, the sense starts to emerge so early in life that there is not a single person on earth without a true self. The first scholar to suggest the concepts of true self and false self was Winnicott, David Winnicott. Hornai took a spin on Winnicott's concepts, psychoanalytic spin on Winnicott's concepts. And today, even though I'm a great admirer of Hornai, her work on Roses is superb, magnificent, unequal. But when it comes to narcissism, today we consider her to be seriously mistaken, to have been seriously mistaken. She conflated simply many disorders that today are rather distinct and separate. So everyone is a true self. The question is whether this true self is functional, whether it's psychodynamically functional, and that harks back to Freud. Freud said that there are structures in the personality which can be rendered inactive, and their energy is pent up and is sublimated or emerges in other ways, like in dreams and so on. So in the case of narcissists, and by the way, not everyone is a true self, only narcissists and borderline. So it's also not true to say that everyone is a true self. Won't they? Sorry, I'll let you finish. So about probably something like 5 to 10% of the population would have a functional false self, and all the others would have a true self. However, it's possible, even with a true, with a fully functional true self, to develop cognitive biases. And that's precisely where social media come in. Grandiosity is a cognitive bias. Grandiosity is a cognitive bias because it falsifies our perception of true reality. It impairs the reality testing. If we are grandiose, we would tend to misinterpret facts. We would tend to refrain events or communication. We would tend to ignore many things. We would tend to emphasize others unjustly, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, grandiosity distorts our perception of reality. Now, social media, what social media do, they enhance grandiosity, they enhance the cognitive bias, and that's not the only cognitive bias they enhance. So I would say that it's a fair description of social media to say that what's the main function of social media is the enhancement of a set of cognitive biases and cognitive deficits. That would capture 90% of the essence of the functioning of social media. Social media simply work on your biases, cognitive biases and cognitive deficits until they become the dominant filtering mechanism, your interface with the world. So this leads to another question that I had where, to what extent do you think it's creating narcissists versus simply attracting and worsening people who are already narcissistic or borderline? Now you can create narcissists. Narcissism is an early childhood phenomenon. The world has been misused and abused and devalued and debased and become meaningless. Narcissism is a clinical entity, it's a condition, and either you develop it in early childhood or you don't. You can have narcissistic traits or narcissistic behaviors, even narcissistic defenses or narcissistic reactions. Ironically, the victims of narcissistic abuse have narcissistic defenses. They react with enhanced narcissism, but that doesn't render them narcissists or anyone else for that matter. You can have narcissistic biases such as grandiosity. It doesn't make you a narcissist. So social media do not create narcissists because you can't create narcissists. What they do, as I said, they enhance narcissistic defenses, they enhance cognitive biases and deficits, which are very typical of narcissists. For example, splitting. Splitting is a primitive defense mechanism. It's also known as dichotomous thinking. It's when you think about everything in terms of black and white, good and bad, with me or against me. You know, black and white thinking. So social media encouraged this because they create echo chambers and silos within which you are exposed only to like-minded people. And of course, these are cult-like settings. Social media today are comprised of thousands or tens of thousands of cults. And within a cult, there's always paranoia. It breeds paranoia against the external world, against external enemies, real and imagined. So social media have become paranoid, platforms that encourage paranoid ideation. And no wonder that conspiracy theories thrive on social media. Fake news thrive on social media because these are hallmarks and characteristics of cults. So a lot is going on, which is pathological and mentally sick and so on. But of course, social media, nothing actually, not only social media, cannot create mental health disorders. Right. Only exacerbate them. That actually kind of leads me into another question that I want to ask. Now, I assume that you're familiar with the shadow archetype that Jungian concept. And when you talk about social media, using the algorithm to essentially create like a digital copy of you, it's almost like in a digital sense, like in terms of ones and zero, it's almost like engaging on Twitter, YouTube, searching on Google and so forth. All of that exhaust data that they're using to essentially create like a behavior map of you, it's almost like it creates the shadow. And while it may not produce narcissists, I wonder to what extent it is sort of pushing people towards their own shadow. People might sit around and say things on social media that they would normally not say to people face to face. I find it very hard to believe, for example, that if I was walking through a shopping mall or I was sitting at a food court and talking with a friend, that some stranger would just butt into our conversation and say something really rude to me because they didn't like the subject matter. They didn't like me talking about race or didn't like me talking about politics. But on social media, that's incredibly easy. On what extent that it's pushing people towards those previously hidden aspects of themselves? Then that's what we're calling radicalization. That the ways that people act out and the way that people behave, that social media sort of pushes you towards enacting possibly even in real life those behaviors that maybe 15 or 20 years ago would have been completely unheard of. Well, I suggest not to use Jungian or other terms because then we would have to descend into the question of what exactly is the shadow or is the residents of complexes. It's not that simple. Shadow is not just unacceptable behaviors in the dark side. Shadow in Jung's methodology, the shadow is a very compounded place where complexes reside and resolved and so on and so forth. So let's not use this term. I would suggest a much simpler term. Disinhibition. When you drink, your behavior changes. Your behavior changes not in the sense that you become a different person. That is a myth. You don't become a different person. You allow yourself to behave in ways which normally you would not have allowed yourself to behave in. So you become promiscuous. What extent, though, does this then interfere with people's ability to have productive conversations online? So for example, if I post an article that I write, occasionally I will answer questions about it if people are not clear about something that I wrote, if they wanted to find out where I picked up a particular piece of knowledge and I'm very happy to discuss it with them. But what I find is that the more... I don't want to say negative, but the more intense forms of engagement where people almost have a... they begin to develop a bit of a parasocial relationship with the author that they'll ask questions but then not accept the answer, just continue to push them. The answer is never going to be good enough. It doesn't matter what answer you give them. If they disagree with you, say politically, then it gives them license to just say whatever they want. Or when people have small differences between them politically, that something that somebody said on social media is always going to end up being, given the least charitable reading possible. And I'm thinking about, for example, the US primary election. Now, granted, there are some vast differences between people who say that they're on the left, but I've noticed that even in the spaces where there are very, very small differences between people, it becomes this huge conflagration. People who, for example, support Bernie Sanders and somebody else who supports Bernie Sanders or partial to Elizabeth Warren, that sort of thing. The smallest differences between them become these huge conflagrations that occupy a day or two or three days in social media, which then gets picked up by the news cycle and then launder and repeat because once it gets repeated in the news, then people have to talk about it all over again. And when I've taken myself away from social media, I'm like, what are people even talking about? But once you're into it, it's like these small differences and these huge conflagrations. Can I add one quick thing to that? Something else I noticed along the lines of what you say is, I feel like there's incentive, at least in people's minds, to do deliberately bad faith readings of what you're saying as well, just so that they can enhance the conflict and the friction. So I noticed that too. There's too much tendency to do bad faith readings, I think, to be accidental. Because people actually want to enhance the difference so that they can fight. For some reason, people are attracted to negativity. And I just wanted to add that to what Andre was saying. We live in a world where most legitimate channels for expressing aggression or sublimating it in socially acceptable ways, most of the channels have been blocked. We are over-regulated. The number of laws today is well over 150 times the number of laws 100 years ago. Everything is subject to regulations, laws, edicts, law enforcement. Look at the explosion in law enforcement. The number of prisoners in the United States exceeds 3 million people. So we used to have in the past, until they're recently actually, until let's say 50 or 60 years ago, until the Vietnam era. We used to have legitimate channels for expressing aggression. Aggression was ritualized. There are monies which channel the aggression. Aggression could be sublimated, et cetera, et cetera. We blocked all these channels. That's number one. Number two, we are no longer seen. When you're a baby, if you're not seen, you die. So to be seen is not just a question of vanity or narcissism. It's a survival instinct. You need to be seen. The first thing you do as a baby is attract your mother's attention by smiling and so on. These are caregiver cues. And so in today's world, there's 8 billion, more or less, minus the COVID-19 victims. And so it's difficult to be seen. It's difficult to stand out. So this leads to radicalization. You need to escalate in order to be noticed. And you need to be noticed in order to feel that you exist. And your well-being depends on it. So that's point number two, point number three. You can't trust anyone. And I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I detest conspiracy theories. I've dedicated a big part of my other life fighting off conspiracy theories. I think they are feeble-minded, weak, and pretty stupid. But you really can't trust anyone. You can't trust the authorities. You can't trust the mass media. You can't trust Akadem. They've all been corrupted by various types of interest. Some of them are narcissistic interests, aggrandizement. Some of them are corrupted by money. But they're all corrupted. This is the only point where I fully agree with conspiracy theories. You can trust no one. Now put the three together. Paranoia, the need to be seen via escalating. And the need to legitimize your aggression. In other words, the need to disinhibit. The need to be able, from time to time, to aggress. And the online world is a perfect outlet for this, for the confluence of these three needs. Because when you are verbally abusive, let's call it spade and spade. When you are verbally abusive, you are number one, seen, definitely. It's a fact. You're talking about these people, aren't you? So you're seen. Number two, you can indulge your paranoia because you can disguise it as critical thinking. And number three, you can aggress safely. What social media platforms have provided is a safe environment for almost unbridled aggression. Only very, very recently, YouTube has been taking steps to remove libel and outright death threats. Only recently. Recently, I mean like three months ago. So aggression has been proven into the fabric of social media. Why? Here's the secret. Because it helps to monetize eyeballs. Nothing attracts people more than violence and the prospect of death. Just think about a car accident. Think how many people rob a neck, a car accident. Aggression sells. Aggression monetizes. Aggression attracts eyeballs. Aggression is encouraged. So to be clear, are you saying that the aggression is a feature, not a bug? No, not a bug at all. Of course it's a feature. Let's, for example, take Twitter. When Twitter was conceived, they had two options. You could send in texts via email. They had the software for this. Or you can send in texts via SMS. Now SMS, short messaging system, the text, the telephone text, at the time were limited to 140 characters plus 20 control characters, total of 160. Twitter chose the 140 characters. Why? Well, one of the reasons we are finding out lately is because they've been advised by psychologists that when one is limited in the number of characters, certain emotions are expressed more than others. For example, it's extremely difficult to express true love, profound affection, compassion and empathy using 140 characters. But believe me, all I need to piss you off and aggress severely against you is seven characters. This limitation is not an accident because they did have a technological alternative. You can't say it was the default. It's not true. Simply, actually, there were other types of platforms. For example, IRC. For example, six degrees. No one remembers six degrees. Six degrees was a precursor of MySpace. So these platforms allowed you to input via email, unlimited amount of texts. It's not true that there was no technology. It was a choice because psychologists advised them that it will create arousal. Of course, no one said it will create aggression. But what kind of arousal can you get with 140 characters? Plus, if you use 140 characters, you are bound to be misunderstood. How many people can compress a complex idea? You know what? A simple idea into 140 characters. Very few journalists made it. I've been trained to compress in my early years. I used to be a journalist. So they told me 300 words. I'm used to compress. But it takes training. Most people can't do this. So they provoke mockery. They provoke aggression, ridicule, derision, infighting. It provokes aggression. It ensures inefficacious communication. It's a choice. It's a technology choice. Don't kid yourself. And I feel like every day on Twitter there's a scapegoat of the day where people are just all mocking one person for that day. The one tweet says that every day on Twitter, there's one person that is it and your goal is to not be it. Yeah. I mean, scapegoating, bullying, mobbing, flesh mobbing. You name it. These are all phenomena. None of these phenomena had started with social media. But none of them would be where they are today without social media. None of them. Now, on the positive side, you have political movements, activists who are making use of these platforms. But mind you, it's not nice to say, it's politically incorrect to say, but revolutionaries are very aggressive and violent people. Ask the nobility in the French Revolution. Well, yeah, that's actually one thing that I've found. I see where you're going with this, but there's a couple of points of departure. I mean, on the one hand, yes, the act of revolution often does follow a path of violence, but I also find that it's very difficult to get people on the same page about anything where it comes to social media, because if you're trying to be brief, to fit within the character limit, or at least to make yourself understood through the means of the platform, it is very easy to be misunderstood. So it's very hard to organize things. At the same time, it seems like the modes of activism that require the most in-depth kind of communication. I'm thinking, for example, of mutual aid organizations. So there are these organizations that are popping up to help people, let's say, if they're disabled, and they need someone to go pick up groceries, or they don't have any money. So you need to have lengthy conversations, and I'm finding that for most mutual aid organizations, there's a phone number, or they encourage you to email, but there's no coordination that's happening over, say, Twitter. It's just like the most emotionally exhaustive modes of communication are what end up on Twitter, but then the kinds where you need to actually empathize with people that goes offline. When it comes to politics or geopolitics, I would compare Twitter to a fuse. It's not the grenade, it's the fuse. It has a useful function in this sense, and it does help logistically. If you want to create a flash mob, Twitter is great. And so on and so forth, but what it does do, and that's very important to realize, I've been a political analyst for decades, I have many heads, that's one of them. I can tell you, politics and geopolitics have been caricatured, have been rendered in Marcuse's words, one-dimensional. So the politics, the Arab Spring, for example, take the Arab Spring. Arab Spring was conducted at its inception, at least, via Twitter. Arab Spring is not a political movement, that's why it has failed. The Arab Spring is the most abysmal and dismal failure in the history of revolutionary movements. Why? Because it has been reduced to 140 characters. The constraints of the platforms caricatured the process, did not allow the process to take roots, to become profound, to become deep, and to respond on multiple levels, to multiple exigencies and needs and so on and so forth. Multiple constituencies. So subtlety in social media and most human processes, even marriage, forget about political movements, requires subtlety. Social media encourage caricatures. They encourage kiss, keep it simple, stupid. They encourage dumbing down. They encourage the crassest and basest instincts. They encourage disinhibition. They are not good, I'm sorry to say. I think something you were saying about radicals being violent, something that I was thinking about, right? When you said that is, if you think about the people politically who kind of do the worst on social media, as in just inept and always getting looking inept, in social media departments we call it getting dunked on. The moderates, the centrists, those type of people, they don't know how to weaponize social media as well as, say, the alt-right, as well as, say, the far left, as well as, say, I remember... How can you weaponize moderation? Yeah, exactly. Social media are not amenable to moderation over the middle ground or compromise or anything. People forget ISIS was very, very social media savvy when it was in the news a lot. And I think what you were talking about reminds me of the saying, what got you here won't get you there. As in it's very good at channeling that initial very raw aggression and passion that I think you need to have revolutionary politics, but even revolutionary politics can't get by on just aggression alone. At some point you have to coordinate values, create positive values, create more nuanced ways of understanding and operating. You can't just yell at people all day, but a lot of people never get past that. And I kind of noticed that with things like Bernie Sanders and stuff, he had a very good online presence, but there were a lot of people who just didn't want to move past yelling at moderate Democrats as far as their political action. Well, Obama was embedded in leveraging social media as well. I mean, I think it worked both ways. For Trump, for Obama, for... Trump and Obama share something in common. They are both messianic narcissistic figures. Social media are easily leveraged by messianic narcissistic figures because they combine legitimized aggression, very subtle in the case of Obama, very refined, very sophisticated, but still aggression, with a message that can be easily diskilled in a single sentence. Yes, we can make America great again. These are caricatures. We are all being reduced to caricatures by this. And the situation now with social distancing, we think it's a new development. Statistics don't support this. 11% of all American households are comprised of a single individual. And these people hardly go out. Starting in the year 2016, majority of adult women in the United States didn't have a single meaningful encounter with the opposite sex. That actually... And I do want to sort of pivot to the way that people are now becoming isolated unto themselves. But one last thing I did want to mention was that in 2016, there was a paper by... that was released from Elsevier. And it talked about Facebook in particular. It was the chilling effect of Facebook where test participants, and the qualitative portion of the paper, they're asking participants, how does Facebook combat your life and how have you changed your behaviors? And young people were saying, for example, that if they go out to parties, they would like... If they had alcohol in their hand, they would try to hide it so that if somebody was taking a candid picture, that they wouldn't be seen with alcohol in their hand. Or they wouldn't be seen with a marijuana joint in their hand. Young women were saying that they don't take the cameras with them to the beach because they don't want to be... They don't want to take pictures, they don't want to have their picture taken. And it's not like... Not only is it having a pronounced effect on the way that we talk about politics, but even the way that we just engage each other in real life. So if you work for an organization and you're public-facing, or your boss may not agree with you politically, you might even not want to go to a rally, like a political rally. You might not want to have your picture taken around certain people. It has a chilling effect. It used to be called Big Brother in my time. Yeah, it's like a super pentatocon. But it's not just moderating criminal behavior, it's now moderating our... It's moderating our political behavior, like how much you want to get into politics. They kind of made us become our own Big Brother, like to ourselves. They don't want us to have a centralized person or organization doing it. This is part of two processes. The first one, the blurring of boundaries between the virtual and the real. Virtual actually becomes the only reality. So a comedian who played the president of Ukraine became the president of Ukraine. A reality TV star became the president of the United States, and he was preceded by an actor, a B-movie actor. So there is a blurring, there's a bleeding of the edges between virtual and social media, is the quintessence and the epitome and the culmination of this process, where actually we live longer on social media than in any other setting. Studies in the United States have shown that certain age groups spend between four and five hours a day on social media. These are four to five waking hours. That's half the day, or one-third of the day, if you're insomniac. So there's a blurring of... That's the first thing. And the second thing is the introjection. We are internalizing social media. They are slowly becoming an inner voice. We call this in psychology an introject. They are slowly becoming an inner voice. And it's an inner voice that has essentially two functions, supervision and feedback. On the one hand, this inner voice monitors you and you're constantly aware of its existence and presence and so on. It's like a big eye in the sky or whatever you want to call it. And the second function is, of course, feedback. But feedback, that is essentially narcissistic feedback. In other words, am I doing the right thing to be seen, appreciated, admired, attended to, et cetera, et cetera? Am I doing the right thing, period? But am I doing the right thing in a goal-oriented manner? Now, which group of people have this kind of thinking? Yes, you guessed it right, psychopaths. Psychopaths are goal-oriented. They want sex, they want money, they want power. They will stop at nothing. All their internal processes are goal-filtered and goal-focused. So today, people don't ask, am I doing the right thing, but am I doing the right thing to obtain this or that goal? In other words, people are becoming more and more narcissistic and psychopathic. I mean, as you're talking about, that I'm thinking of incels, for example, right? And people, when they think of incels, they think of generally young men that don't get out very much. They don't talk to the opposite sex and so on. But now, none of that you mentioned that there's a significant portion of young women that don't have meaningful contact with men. I'm also seeing the same thing happen on social media with young women. There's a seething anger that there's, I don't know if it's a romantic relationship that some of them are looking for, or if it's just intimacy or contact, but there's almost like an underlying anger that they're not getting what they want. And then it feeds itself, it feeds into this constant state of warfare where people are talking about just saying really horrendous things about men or saying horrendous things about women, but it always seems to come back to like, there's something that they want from other people that they're just not getting, so they're just trauma venting on social media. I'm not sure if you guys deserve that. So this kind of paradoxical about it is how these people are talking to people in a way, communicating with people in a way more than ever because they're on social media all day long, constantly plugged in, yet somehow everyone's more alienated. It's a weird paradox of you're more connected and somehow more alone at the same time and then it's causing this anger to me that you're talking about. Two important distinctions. One, two monologues never make a dialogue. Number two, information is not knowledge. Social media provides you with a platform for monologues. Now these monologues mimic dialogues because you have your monologue, then I have my monologue and it looks like we are talking. We are not talking, we are not communicating, we are definitely not connecting. In the best case, you are my sounding board and I don't need you even for that because I can immortalize my words. I can record them, I can upload them. I don't need you for this. I don't need you even as an audience anymore. Digital technologies rendered us self-sufficient. The truth is, the sad truth, the tragic truth is we don't need each other anymore, at least not for social function. That's the first thing. The second thing is, as I said, that the virtual and the real are intermixing. It's very difficult to tell them apart and the virtual is beginning to have more significant impacts on our lives. I am much more affected or impacted by social media than by anyone real in my life. My income, my livelihood, my reputation, professional and otherwise, disreputed in my case and so on and so forth, they are all critically dependent on social media. Social media became mission critical. There's no reality without social media. It's beginning to bleed into reality. It's beginning to have real life repercussions, consequences. Now, if you want to be self-efficacious, if you want to secure the best outcomes in your life from your environment, you have to go via the mediation of social media. At the beginning of the inception of the internet, you were maybe too young, I don't know, we were all bragging that the internet is going to disintermediate. The internet was going to eliminate intermediaries such as publishers, editors, gatekeepers. It ended up doing exactly the opposite. Today, there are giant portals and gates that keep us apart from each other and apart from all the rest. So today, if I want to access reality even, I need to do this through gatekeepers. And while in the pre-internet world, there were thousands of gatekeepers, today in the internet world, we have three gatekeepers. Three gatekeepers. It's a cartel. You know, antitrust action is required here. Something interesting about what you're talking about, right? There used to be all these little forums, message boards. Sometimes they'd be private. You needed to register, and people just passing by couldn't, you know, get into them. So there were all these little places where people congregate, and they would also be moderated, you know, where somebody would be checking. A lot of times, they would recruit moderators from the community to make sure that people weren't being trolls or being abusive, but it was self-policed. There was some nameless central organism in the Twitter headquarters or Facebook headquarters deciding what was good and what wasn't. And I feel like there was more communication in all those little pockets, whereas the idea of creating one giant worldwide chat room, which is what Twitter, Facebook, and these things become, where the whole world is in one giant space, you would think, okay, everybody in one space would lead to better communication or connection, and it's the opposite. It's almost like that cartel that you're talking about of making just one giant room and the people in the room don't really have the final say about what's being said and people being forced together is actually making more filter bubbles to me than the million little forums that we used to have. And I was wondering what you thought about that. Well, it's much more centralized. No question about it. End of story, it's much more centralized. Two, three corporate entities control speech, control speech acts, control all communication channels. They control not only the communication channel, the distribution channel, they interfere actively with the content. Case in point, I made a series of highly academic videos on COVID, the COVID-19 pandemic. None of my videos included any reference however remotely to any of the idiotic conspiracy theories that circulate on the internet. All my videos were academic based on copious references and so on. YouTube removed these videos. Oh, is that why they were gone? Because I was looking at them to ask you questions about them today and there's only about three left. Oh, yeah, because I was planning to talk to you about those videos and I couldn't find them to research for questions today. To each and every video, I have read literature. I've interviewed epidemiologists and virologists. I relied on authorities who made their own videos like Ioannides and Kwiatkowski. We are talking about people from Stanford, not people from David Ike and London Real. And despite these multiple, multiple rigorous academic filtering criteria, I mean my videos were academic works. End of story, they were removed because they go against the party line. Listen, I lecture in Russia. Let me tell you something. In Russia, there's something called Roscomandzo. It's a censorship agency for internet content. Roscomandzo would have never dared to remove my videos. I'm telling you this with full responsibility. The Russian government so derided and decried by the State Department would have never dared to do what YouTube had done. And YouTube is a monopoly and should be regulated as a monopoly. And monopolies are like utility companies. They cannot interfere with the electrical current or the water. They must provide it freely, I mean not freely, but provide it equally to every single eligible consumer. So YouTube should never be allowed to censor any speech. YouTube can add disclaimers like Facebook is doing now. But should never be given the power to delete. It's shocking. It didn't happen in China. In China, the doctors who discovered COVID-19 were communicating freely on chat apps equivalent of YouTube. No one took down their messages or posts in China. The Communist Party of China behaves more liberally than YouTube. Can you talk about curated versus network effect? Because I think we're kind of headed in that direction with what you're talking about now about the different types of spaces. We can explain what those two different things are. There is an enormous gap and abyss between moderation and curation and censorship. Censorship has been exercised truly only by a handful of regimes. Even the most dictatorial regimes usually do their best to refrain from heavy-handed outright censorship because they realize it's a pressure valve. People express their frustrations and aggression verbally. They don't do it on the street. So with the exception of Nazi Germany, and by the way Nazi Germany actually implemented censorship, effective censorship, only 1938 when it was headed to war, until 1938 you could have read articles against the fear, against Adolf Hitler. Actually one of the major journalists in Germany had to leave Germany in 1939 because until 1939 he was free to write against Adolf Hitler. I'm talking Hitler. So there's a difference between censorship. Now what YouTube had done to my videos is censorship, not moderation, not curation. Now moderation is when certain types of speech are prescribed because they can cause real-life damage or damaging reality to someone. For example, calling to murder someone is a problem and so on and so forth. So certain types, of course, you can't shout fire in the theater. I mean certain types of speech should be proscribed, obviously. Where do we draw the line? It's an open question where that's the reason we have Helsinki committees, ethics committees. YouTube should appoint a panel with 100 ethicists and philosophers and they will determine speech restrictions from time to time and these people should be utterly independent of YouTube. It's inconceivable that algorithms, robots or worse, teenagers from India would decide which videos should remain online and which should be deleted. Inconceivable, of course. If you call for terrorism, if you call for murder, if you call for violence and mayhem and so on and so forth, it's one thing. So moderation is about this, proscribed speech. But you must be very, very careful with this. The slope is very slippery. Curation is again an entirely different issue. Curation is when you select several items of information, coalesce them or combine them so that the information yields knowledge. That's curation. So you can take raw material, it's essentially taking raw material, processing it so that it yields meta information. It yields knowledge. Now Facebook, I think, is doing the right thing. When Facebook disagrees with one of your videos, they put a disclaimer and the disclaimer says, this may be wrong information. Please educate yourself. Go to the WHO website. Go here, go there. That's okay. That's legitimate. It's like a comment. Facebook is commenting on my video. I have no problem with that. But to take it down brutally, single-handedly, by the way, without an appeal procedure, nothing. Yeah, a lot of people are having problems with YouTube about that, about how they feel it's kind of draconian in their censorship and moderation. And you can't really appeal to do anything. And for people who have their whole livelihood on YouTube, because they're monetized, a lot of them have been expressing, ironically enough, on YouTube about how they feel they need to go somewhere else because picture getting all your income from a place that can arbitrarily not just take down your videos, but just decide, you know what, we're going to take down your whole channel. You go from, you know, when you lose a job, things will go get another job. But it's not easy to go get another monetized video channel like YouTube. Listen, let me tell you the rest of my story. They took down most of my videos. And I made a video in which I said that COVID-19 is becoming a church. It's dogmatic. And you're not allowed to go against the party line or the church line. There's a doctrine. And if you violate the doctrine, et cetera. So I was criticizing YouTube. Not once in the video did I talk about the pandemic, not once, not even for a second. Did I talk about the pandemic, social distancing, nothing. I was criticizing YouTube. Is this legitimate speech? I think it's legitimate speech. It was taken down. It was taken down. And I had been warned that if I do this again, they will delete my channel. This was a video criticizing YouTube's policies. It's totally legitimate speech. I mean, no one can say here that I was advocating against social distancing and badgering the population, whatever. I was criticizing YouTube's censorship. One thing that kind of worries me as we're talking about a centralization and sort of algorithmic curation is it's not just, it's not just an area to YouTube. It is, I mean, it's there to an extent on Facebook, although I would say that Facebook is quite a bit more lax. I have a friend, for example, that organizes trips for activists to go to Cuba who want to participate in the May Day Brigade. So for people who are labor activists, people who are socialists, activists and so forth, they would go to this event. He was talking about it. His Twitter account got nixed after he was tweeting about, hey, there's probably going to be a postponement because of the COVID crisis. His account got terminated. But it happens on YouTube as well as with your example. But also now are, for example, if you want to have a relationship, you're now relegated for the most part to dating apps like Tinder and Bumble. And the way that you communicate with people is now, like you have to learn the language of these online platforms in order to have any success whatsoever. And if you fail to pass those checks, like if you fail to pass those, I guess, those language checks, no one's going to talk to you. So it's almost like we've created these places where you can be either terminated or completely overlooked and ignored. And that's just a function of the system that we've submitted ourselves to. That worries me a little bit. It's a church. You're describing the church. It's a religion. It's exactly what happens in religion. There's a dogma. If you don't have to hear it. And there's jargon too. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Church is a lingo, a slang, unique to it, a vocabulary that is idiosyncratic and occult and arcane. Arcane, you know, only the inner circle, no. And for a very long time, for thousands of years, the priests had maintained a hold on this language. It was Latin. The vernacular was never used. So the population won't understand what they're saying. And so control of the language is critical. And control of language structural elements, as Chomsky would tell me, is even more critical. And YouTube and even more so Tinder, these are language structure platforms. In other words, it's not true that you go to Tinder and you place your Photoshop photo and your face or whatever. And you, you know, you upload your details and that's it. They dictate the flow of info. They dictate how you present yourself. You're not free to choose how to present yourself. They are rubrics. They are search, they are their spaces. And these are confined and constricted spaces. And they allow you to input only specific alphanumeric data. So this is a language. They force you to use a language which might be totally alien to you, to present yourself to the opposite sex for whatever, to an eligible partner. So they have begun to control the language. Now, nowhere is this more obvious than in this pandemic, because in this pandemic, they are openly, blatantly, undisguisedly and unashamedly interfering with free speech. They're interfering with the language itself. They are not hiding it anymore. They are not hiding it anymore. And that is the legacy of this pandemic, not the people who had died, which is lamentable. But the real legacy of this pandemic is the fact that the social media platforms were forced out of hiding. They were forced to expose the true faces. The masks fell. These are eyeball-monetizing commercial entities with ulterior motives, hidden agendas, and surreptitious and pernicious control of the very language that you're allowed to use. These are not free speech platforms by any extension of this loaded phrase. Now, what are some of the... Sorry, Tia, I just wanted to ask one more question because it's kind of down this path. Back in 2010, you mentioned Google's Chief Economist a little while back, and I stuck a pin in that. Google's Chief Economist, Hal Varian, delivered a speech to the American Economic Association and he outlined what was going to be possible with this globally interconnected world where everything depends on computer-mediated transactions and out of the four bullet points that he listed, things like new forms of contract and being able to capture data. But he also mentioned that there are going to be ways that companies, digital companies, can now perform psychological experiments. They can perform controlled experiments with their users. So it kind of sounds to me like we're in the middle of this grand experiment. What is the outcome that you see if nothing changes? I don't think there's a committee that says, okay, let's conduct experiment number 16 out of the manual. But I do think big data, big data is a form of continuous experimentation with huge data sets. These data sets are supposedly anonymized. That's rubbish. Anyone who knows information technology knows that it's utter rubbish. There's no such thing as anonymization, end of story. But okay, let's assume they're anonymized and they're analyzed in ways. And by training, I'm a mathematical physicist, so I know the math. I can tell you that the math used in big data is the same math we use in social and psychological experimentation in studies. It's a math that creates profiles, profiles people, and the same math that's used in the FBI when they profile people. These are the same techniques. So they take these big data sets and they profile people. And of course, in one way to look at it, it's like conducting a massive, either too unprecedented series of experiments on people. But the difference, I think, between... I mean, that's very sinister to describe it like this, because people voluntarily participate. It's not that they are coerced into participation. They voluntarily participate. By now, everyone and his mother knows that his data is processed, used, packaged, and sold, brokered, and sold. Everyone knows there's no privacy, that you're surrendering your personal data in return for some free services. So everyone knows that. No one can claim innocence or... Something that I think is happening is that we're talking about churches and cults and how a big common thing in things that are messianic or cult-like is having a unique or impenetrable jargon or jargon that kind of signals you belong. I think Andre was kind of getting it. Yeah, Arcane. And Andre was saying how even when people date now, you kind of have to signal that you are plugged into the internet. And I was next to a couple at a bar once, and they seemed to have just met through Tinder. And this was the first date. And the guy said something that I think was meant to be cheeky. And I remember the girl said, oh, my God, you're such a troll. And she used this internet term, troll, to describe this guy. And I find it interesting that it seemed to her, she was younger than me. And it seemed to her that reality was just live internet, the way they were talking. Virtual reality and reality. Being blurred. And another way I kind of see it too, and this is one of your favorite examples that I've seen pop up a lot, is the girl who eats bananas on YouTube where people just watch this girl eat bananas. But there's a lot of sites like that. We just watch a girl eat. There's a girl who just eats like lobster. There's that one. I mean, I've seen video games. And but then on top of that, there's this new site that I saw, right? Okay, this is different sites. And they're even starting to mutate and combine with each other, right? Like for example, there's OnlyFans, which is this kind of crowd source pornography kind of site where you follow a girl who's like an influencer and you become her subscriber, you pay some money and you get access to her pornography. And it's a huge moneymaker. It's the biggest social media site out there right now. It's actually not a something intended pornography, but you get to follow her into the bathroom. Yeah, yeah. But in some of them actually do just open the advertising themselves as pornography. Yeah, yeah. So there are OnlyFans. OnlyFans is specifically for sex work, right? Now this was interesting. Some people were saying, why is OnlyFans so much money and people are becoming millionaires off of OnlyFans when there's all this free porn? I was reading and watching articles and documentaries about OnlyFans and what they said was the girl said a big part of our day is messaging lonely people. It's not just looking at our naked pictures and they interviewed some of the power users of OnlyFans and they said yeah, I was just alone by myself watching porn and masturbating and I just feel worse after, but the fact that I could message this girl back and forth that I masturbate to made it feel more like a relationship. So what she was saying is I'm not really selling porn, what Lighties Women were saying, we're actually kind of selling the relationship and the porn is kind of like a decoy. It's like something on top of that, but they just wanted nakedness. They just wanted pornographic acts. They could get better and more graphic stuff on all the tube sites and that's something that I'm seeing happen a lot with social media is I call them like a friend's attitudes, like a combination of friend and prostitutes where people are just selling a prostituting like their friendship. I want someone to have a meal with to the point that I'm willing to watch someone on YouTube eating and pretend that this person on the other side of the table for me. I'm willing to be in a group DM all day and pretend that this is some kind of coffee house salon where people are talking and now they have sites that combine different types of friend attitudes. For example, there's a site that I just saw where you can get an e-girl, like an Onlyfans type of virtual girlfriend, sexy girl and enlist her as a video game playing partner. So you go on this site and the two of you virtually connect and then the two of you together will play a video game while you're talking to each other. So now this site creates this virtual environment where you're playing next to your fake girlfriend on the couch a video game. So this is basically like they're using the pornographic aesthetic as like an on-ramp to parasocial relationships. Yeah that's important from Japan. They invented this kind of approaches. In Japan about 35% of all people under the age of 35 don't have any social contact with anyone. Opposite sex same sex, never mind. They are totally isolated at home. So you have girlfriends for rent and you can spend an actual physical day with them or you can do it only virtually. So she's your girlfriend for a day or for an hour so you pay per hour to have a girlfriend. Japan is the name of the game. We want to see the future look at Japan. Yes, it's very much the canary in the coal mine. Sorry? I was saying, yeah, yeah. I think there are four, there's a confluence of four trends here. The first one is very profound. Text, text, alphabet is an aberration. The vast majority of human history has been spent with visuals. In Altamira Cave, in Spain, you don't find text on the wall. You find paintings. Visuals are the natural mode of communication among humans and there has been an aberration, there's been a resilience, there's been an accident of history for four or five thousand years which is nothing in terms of history where we've been using text and then it's over. Now it's over. Text is dead and it's been, we reverted to form. We regressed to pretextual age. We are back to images. So today most searches start on YouTube, not on Google and that's why of course Google bought YouTube. So this is a tectonic shift from text to visuals back to visuals, I should say. The second thing is the rise of voyeurism, not exhibitionism because the people who exhibit themselves, they do it for money or they do it for ulterior motives. But the rise of voyeurism we are so atomized that we are not calibrated anymore. We are out of whack. We are, there's no inner compass. We are totally disoriented. We are depersonalized. We are derealized. We are dissociative. We are discontinuous. So we need calibration from the outside and this is accomplished via voyeurism. We get to peep, get a look at other people's lives and it helps us to calibrate somehow. It's a very critical function which we used to achieve by participating in church activities in the parish or by meeting up with friends in a pub or by talking to a family member. We don't have any of this. All social institutions have vanished, literally vanished, not collapsed, vanished, gun, nema, dead, nientating. No family, no community, no church, no nothing. We are all alone and so we are trying to calibrate ourselves via voyeurism. Then there's the rise of the imitations are much more cherished and valued. It's the rise of the imitation. Imitations are more valued than originals and this started of course with photography and Benjamin's famous work about the reproduction of art. In photography you can't tell which is the original and which is the copy. Original and copy became the same. What is the internet if not one huge photography laboratory? It's all about photography. So imitations are now more valued than originals and why is that? Because imitations are reproducible, they can be copied and therefore they have a higher monetary value. In other words, if you have a single Picasso only one person can own this Picasso or one museum can own this Picasso but if you make a lithography of Picasso you can sell 5,000 copies and if you make a photograph of the Picasso painting you can sell a million copies or you can distribute it freely 200 million people. In other words imitations and copies have a much higher intrinsic monetary value and in a thoroughly commercialized world imitation became much more important than originals. Originals became an excuse to make imitations so I call it the rise of the exatz. It's a small step from this to having an imitation girlfriend an imitation friend, a copy of a neighbor and so on and so forth and of course that's precisely where we are going. We are going to a world where there will be holographic pornography, inflatable sex dolls, androids, humanoids and so on and so forth. I mean we are very shortly we are talking like I think 10, 15 years 20 maybe if people are very slow and the pandemic continues there's a backlash against this but ironically the backlash takes place only in impersonal spaces so where all over the place there is a rise of the copy a rise of the imitation which was predicted by Benjamin where all over the world this is happening in some subspaces there is a rise of the authentic, a backlash against imitation, against copies and a support of the authentic and the original but in very curious subspaces for example in pornography in pornography people pay a premium, literally by the way people pay money in pornography to observe real life people, not actors but authentic experiences so there are websites for example of cuckolds where people pay subscription to watch cuckolds or swingers in action and they have this tag verified amateur you know amateurism, authenticity veritability, the real McCoy the real thing there's a backlash in support of all these but in spaces which are totally impersonal like pornography spaces and like for example Twitter Twitter is a highly impersonal space no one posts really personal things on Twitter Twitter is your persona Goffman called it persona Twitter is your persona, you called it it's your public figure so Twitter is an impersonal space but on Twitter you have this verified tags you know this V like you're the real person yeah I have one of those in these impersonal spaces authenticity and real life prevail but only where you are not yourself but something ironically that happens though is that whenever any mechanism comes to create this these little breads of fresh air authenticity the system kind of games it and then degrades it and what I mean is for example on Twitter that verified tag that blue check has been it's been getting more and more lax because now there's people who are just like brands or people who are just like internet figures without the real names you know it'll just be like an anime picture and a fake name but the person is very popular kind of like an E celebrity and they're starting to give those people these verified tags which to me kind of defeats the purpose because I'm like okay now you're giving it to like characters you know these aren't even like a face and a real name this is someone who's anonymous and has an anime picture but they have 300,000 followers so I know it's like something about the system keeps moving things back toward authenticity like it tries to co-op and bring it back to that well I think the explanation is very simple authenticity implies idiosyncrasy implies uniqueness you cannot homogenize you cannot commodify you cannot package you cannot broker and you cannot sell idiosyncratic unique people you need to standardize when you buy rice you don't buy rice one grain at a time you buy rice you buy like you know so the aim of this I mean they are like bulldozers they are like what do you call these machines that straighten the asphalt new asphalt on the roads steamroller steamroller they steamroll over people they commodify them they render them one dimensional and that's Herbert Marcuse it's phenomenal work and it was predicted by several outstanding thinkers Christopher Lash in the culture of narcissism Guy Debord a French thinker in his magnificent book the society of spectacle very difficult to read but worth every minute of effort may he read that for the last six months now yeah I keep putting off reading it I have to read it it's Althusser Althusser created the concept of interpolation which essentially is about steamrolling if I could suggest one more one more book in case people are listening and writing down books but there's one by Daniel Borstein called The Image that I think is a very good one too Librarian of Congress you should know true so this is it and when you stand out your head is chopped off something about the book The Image that I just thought of I think very much applies to the space is the image had this part of the book where it talks about hero versus celebrity and it differentiates between the two by saying a hero is somebody who became a legend or whatever through the act of distinguishing themselves by an actual action and a hero doesn't just have to be someone who like saves people or a policeman or a military person or a general whatever but you can have heroes in the realm of an artistic expression or science like you know for example Einstein would be a hero because he accomplished something he innovated something Beethoven could be considered more of a hero than a celebrity at first because he created works of lasting value but celebrities are more known for being known and one of the things that media he was talking about television at the time but what's interesting is everything he was talking about the book is amplified by social media so the book still works you just have to imagine the book on steroids or multiplied exponentially but he was saying that media converts even heroes to celebrities so for example Charles Lindberg did something that people considered heroic as far as flying the plane but once the media got hold of him what he talked about was where he was today what he ate gossip about different things the Lindbergh baby was a big news story media converts the hero to the celebrity it has no space for heroes it just has space for known people people who are known for being known and people that you have to compulsively try to tear down to your level or whatever even in things like the tabloids a big section is stars they're just like us but that never existed with heroes heroes had epics written about them it wasn't about trying to make the hero relatable the point of the hero was that they weren't relatable but now in social media we've taken the celebrity and even degraded it even more with the influencer and to me I think the gap between the influencer and the celebrity is probably equal to or even more than the gap from the celebrity to the hero about the rise of the well-known person online the end of the gatekeepers and now people are being rewarded for just being known on the internet even if they have no real expertise this is one point of divergence between my thinking and Burstein's and I'm more along the lines of Debo and other post-Marx's like Althusser and so on I think what has happened is we have transitioned from a romantic view of the hero because this is a romantic view of the hero we have transitioned from a romantic view of the hero to a mundane or pedestrian view of the hero so I think that celebrities are known not for being known but they are known for living life in other words life became a heroic effort if I could say one quick thing I actually don't diverge from Burstein there because that's one of his elements of being a celebrity is that they're mundane, they were discovered in this place or they do so I just want to add that you actually are in line with Burstein on that Burstein mentions living life but I'm going further than that what I'm saying is celebrities are known for the act of living in other words they are actors they act activity going on exactly like Hercules who killed the Gorgon whatever they and the reason they become celebrities is because they live life heroically their lives are bigger than life but they are still recognizable lives the romantic heroes were the kind of people where you would have said I could never be like that I could never write a symphony I could never kill a monster I could never kill armies to battle like Napoleon I could never negative heroes like Adolf Hitler I could never kill 6 million Jews I could never do this they were inhuman they were non-human they were godlike and indeed in ancient Greece and later in ancient Rome republican Rome heroes were half gods, demigods because they were not human there's very little human in them what we have the revolution we have deified the mundane we have rendered life itself heroic and honestly in today's world you need to be a hero to survive it is so complicated, so alienated so dangerous, so everything that it does take heroism to survive the typical person in today's world undergoes more traumas, visits more places, travels further and is exposed to more information than all his ancestors combined that's not me, that's Alvin Toflin so you need to be a hero just to survive that's one thing, second thing there's a process that I call malignant egalitarianism malignant egalitarianism is the great equalizer the great equalizer is a smartphone you have a smartphone, you are as wise and knowledgeable as Wikipedia you are as much an expert as any other expert because you can search google you can google, you know everyone is equal now there are no authorities, no experts, no hierarchies no superior knowledge, even life experience is pretty meaningless because it's pulled and you can access it the fact that everyone was given a portal or access to a portal like in Star Trek you know, has rendered everyone in their minds at least equal to each other so we have malignant egalitarianism and so take for example the serial killer, I think the serial killer is the epitome and combination of all all these trends the serial killer could be you, you could be a serial killer so it's an equal opportunity profession and the serial killer serial killer's life is his story so in this sense he's a celebrity and of course we all remember the movie Born Killers and so the media plugs into this, glamorizes the serial killer but not as a hero not as a new hercules hercules or something, glamorizes him as one of us who's made it serial killers end up with their own entries in Wikipedia what else can you aspire to in life, you know it's the height of human achievement and human accomplishment so you sacrifice a few people doing this, happens, you know something you said about malignant egalitarianism there's times where I'll be talking about a subject that grew up with, like I feel like I'm an expert on that, you know, it could be a hobby that I've had for two decades or something and I'd be arguing with somebody and this person clearly is just running to Wikipedia and dropping stuff on Wikipedia or googling stuff you know, like this happens with Andre too, like someone will someone will clearly be finding, we're googling and finding studies on this spot and trying to drop them in and then I'll have to tell them that study doesn't say what you think it says it actually says the opposite and I'll tell them the part of the study, because it's the study I read before and I'm like, no, this study is actually saying the opposite you clearly just found this study or you clearly just went to Wikipedia and like why can't you just admit that you don't know what you're talking about why are you insistent and I think it's because it's like you said, this is an idea that it's not really anti-intellectual so much as a degrading of the intellectual space people actually do want to be intellectual people confuse people confuse appearance with substance and they confuse it not only there but in this particular case appearance is the axis people confuse axis with content they think if they have axis they have the content and this is appearance and substance but I want to tell you a story an amusing story well I find it amusing 25 years ago I came up with a new mental health diagnosis inverted narcissist it's my invention so I came up with the diagnosis I characterized it, I typified it I wrote all the criteria the criteria used today for this diagnosis are mine I wrote every single word I wrote whole books about this particular diagnosis it is now recognized as a new name nevermind it's called narcissist, codependent but it's the same diagnosis so I'm the father and the mother of this diagnosis to this very day I'm getting emails emails, same back name you may know classic narcissism but you have no idea what is an inverted narcissist are you there? you have no idea what an inverted narcissist is you don't need to go far go to amazon and look up my book on inverted narcissism there is a review there by a psychologist from Scandinavia somewhere and he says the same problem is that he has no acquaintance with this diagnosis he needs to learn about it and I get hundreds of comments on my youtube videos on the diagnosis saying that I don't know what it means and they are referring me to Richard Granon and Melania Tonya Evans for me to learn what is an inverted narcissism so that next time I make a video I don't commit these foolish mistakes and you predate all those people because I have been following you for a while so that is very funny I find it amusing it's not just the predating, it's also like he created the concept trying to correct him on a concept he created and represents another problem with social media and so on there is no time, it's timeless I was just going to get to that I was trying to get there it's like like Lenin said there are weeks but it seems like with social media it does two things at once it compresses time and then expands it compresses in the sense that it's really hard to follow everything that's happening all the time there's just no way to absorb all the information that's being spat at you when you scroll through your twitter feed or your facebook feed but at the same time the way that everything is set up almost expands everything backwards like a friend of mine when he makes posts about black boys and the kind of child abuse they face in the household and that sort of thing people will go and find a tweet that he made like six or seven years ago or something and try to say that you don't even care about that, you're a misogynist and this is something that he said but it's like you can reach back to something that somebody said off-handedly six or seven years ago take it completely out of context and say this is who you are many things are not dated for example you go online if you look up inverted Nazis which you can do after the show you will find my article and a hundred other articles or a thousand other articles now some of them are dated but vast majority including my article the original article there they see articles by me by ten others and they like the other nine so they attack me because they dislike me so it's like to do with the content and it's malignant egalitarianism because I found ten articles online none of them dated it makes me an expert yeah simultaneity you called it synchronicity but it's a bad type of synchronicity timelines are very crucial intellectual timelines intellectual pedigree is very crucial for example I was watching a video with a couple of friends of mine it was a Michael Parenti lecture from way back in the 1980s and one of my friends didn't like a thing that he said he was answering a question about states and patriotism and he was asked the question by a woman in the audience so I didn't like the way that he answered the question because he wasn't very gender progressive but I'm like yeah but you also have to keep in mind that this is you know the end of the second wave hitting into the third wave of feminism there were different kinds of conversations happening back then there were different things that he was like there were different countervailing forces in society he's responding to he's not just answering a question on gender and imperialism but it's like you can just pluck those moments apply whatever our current understandings are to them because nothing has any time but something about the internet with time in general is and it's very paradoxical internet is very ephemeral everything just kind of evaporates and nothing is built to last but at the same time paradoxically nothing goes away either so it's like the things that you want to go away are always in danger of being rediscovered resurfacing like once you send it to the internet people say you can never take it back it's going to be out there forever but on the flip side things that you actually want to keep things that you actually want to find again somehow you can never find them yeah it's hard to hold on to anything yeah so it's hard to get rid of anything but it's also hard to hold on to it at the same time and especially on social media that's the case but you see this is not new for example the entirety the entirety of ancient Greek thinking has vanished and was rediscovered only during the Middle Ages a thousand years later thousands of years later so the library of Alexandria burned down I mean 10,000 manuscripts without any copies got lost human knowledge has always been ephemeral on the contrary maybe today with digital copies for example internet archive the Wayback machine maybe with digital copies we actually have a much higher level of preservation than ever ever in human history ever to this very day we are missing 90% of the works of Euripides this would have never happened on the internet would have never happened on the internet of that I'm sure well yeah this is kind of weird like the it would never happen on the internet but strangely at the same time it would be kind of cheap and retained less if that makes sense like we have everything now but somehow it's all kind of diluted at the same time things are old news like nothing's allowed to be timeless on the internet like it's kept it's preserved but it's immediately old news it's forgotten it's forgotten while it's kept if that makes sense it's an issue known as discoverability how you tell apart how you tell apart quality from from you know levels of quality quantity overwhelms quality trash there is the gems and so on so forth so this for the first time in human history there was a problem of discoverability because there are no gatekeepers there are no quality inspectors there are no quality standards anyone can publish on amazon kindle and everyone does 3.7 million books last year one year and you know something that's very interesting like and you brought this up yourself in one of your videos is with this kind of lack of gatekeepers and everyone can be heard it incentivizes topics that are easily become experts in because if in this rise of influencers where now even our public intellectuals are basically plucked off of twitter because they have a whole bunch of followers like this big authors now who got their start by message boards or twitter if you are somebody who wants to become like a celebrity intellectual such a thing exists you can't just start physics today by the time you're ready for prime time you know who knows what's going to happen if you want the instant gratification that the internet gets you and that's what likes are it's an instant gratification addiction in everything it's easier to just become an expert in comic books read a bunch of Wikipedia stuff pop culture etc so I noticed that the type of intellectuals that we're getting through the rise of influencers it's elevated wide and shadow yeah wide and shadow easy to master knowledge things that you can be ready to talk about after six months of cramming on or six hours of cramming on again I don't think it's a new phenomenon actually in the 1950s very few people could become physicists so the majority of them became experts on football or astrologers or they read the tea leaves the aspiration to be an expert on something even if it's only on your wife expert on something a niche where you can claim your position intellectually the aspiration is universal and has been with us forever what the internet has done it has made it more visible but I don't think it has changed the dynamics I do think it's rewarded it more because even if you did become an expert on something how could you get your name known because someone had to approve you oh no I'm done someone had to publish you now you can publish yourself the words have been different in the past if you were an expert on football you went to the local pub and there were 20 ardent fans of yours and you knew each one of them by name and you were your daughter married the son of one of them you were intermarried and it was close-knit community and the type of reward was very different today you're an expert on football you have 300,000 subscribers on YouTube you don't know a single one of them so in the past it was quality the quality of the interaction emotions involved community, support etc and today the only reward is quantitative how many followers you have how many fans, how many subscribers so there's been a shift from quality to quantity but not a shift in basic human motivation to be called an expert on something and because as I said a tiny percentage can become physicists all the others go into astrology or myopathy, football and 5G and alien reptiles I have one last question and I'll let Andre ask any last questions he has but this is an open-ended one and I thought this was probably the most disturbing thing I heard you say and I want to know how much of it was hyperbolic and how much of it was true but you brought the idea that people becoming so conditioned by the internet and more used to unreality than reality that we end up evolving two fundamentally incompatible psychologies in society of people who can't really relate to each other like internet conditioned people and non-internet conditioned people and if I'm paraphrasing what you're saying wrong in any way please feel free to correct me but if you could talk about that for a bit I compared social media you must admit it was prescient of me so I compared it to a pandemic in effect explicitly I compared it to a pandemic in one of my interviews with Richard Gretel and I said that most pandemics involve viruses which are self-limiting I even gave example of the coronavirus in one of the interviews and I said that I suspect therefore that social media will plateau and then growth growth factor will diminish and then they will stop at that point there will be a group of people who are addicted to social media and conditioned by them by definition yes if there's no growth then there's a finite number of people and these people are addicted and conditioned and all the other people will not be exposed to social media because social media will not be growing growth will stop so many many for example the newborn 130 million newborn every year so new generations and so on the hype of social media have plateaued and so these people will be maybe they will have other things maybe they will have holographic sex or some other addictions or types of conditioning but not social media so I said that social media there will be social media conditioned and addicted people and non-social media people and there these people will have very little in common because social media is a self-sustaining self-containing self-sufficient narcissistic enclosed system in other words social media is reality they are reality this is a new type of reality and so these people who are conditioned and addicted will inhabit another reality than people who are not conditioned and addicted and these two reality will not intermesh they will not interact and so the species will break down into people who function in one type of reality and people who function in another type of reality and no I don't think it's hyped by any I think you can see you can see this happening today I have a quick follow up on that based on what you just said who do you think will be the out group because I think most people listening will assume that the people pathologized by social media are going to be these people who are on the outs of society and unable to integrate but I fear that actually the people pathologized by social media are actually going to be the ones in control or inherit the earth so to speak they will actually be the opposite the people not pathologized will be kind of not being able to understand the world around them and feeling like they're on the outside moving in, I'm looking in so I'm curious what which group you think will actually be again you have the answer today access to digital technologies is much lower among minorities including blacks among in developing countries vast swaths of Africa so I think you're right the elite will be the people who use social media on a regular basis and whose reality resides exclusively in social media these will be the new elites and all the disenfranchised and all the poor, the slaves because I postulate that we are transitioning from capitalism to new feudalism and so the new slaves in this neo feudalistic society or civilization global civilization these new slaves will have limited access to digital technologies and if they do have access won't know what to do with this access and because social media will have plateaued and will have become a lot less inclusive by the way because they will demand for example verification of ID or because they will be regulated or because they will be you know I think there are signs that social media are closing down they are no longer the libertarian free for all Wild West platforms they used to be so I think there will be a big chunk of population with no access to digital technologies especially with emphasis on social media there will be the slaves and there will be the masters and the masters will have access of course to social media and will leverage it for internal communication, coordination and if you want conspiracies Andrew you have any last questions actually half way answer the question I was going to ask which is is there any value to removing yourself from the space but it seems like you are saying that if you remove yourself from the space then you also remove yourself from the privilege that comes along with being that gentry class not now, right now everyone in this dog is on social media not right now but once social media become more of a club so I think they are transitioning to a club model until now they were like the Wild West but they will gradually close down they will gradually limit access they are already removing members quite a few so I think ultimately this will become elite clubs elite relatively speaking an elite club of a billion people is not exactly elite and not exactly a club but that's the closest equivalent I can think of they will become an elite club and it's a tool it's an instrument, of course when you give up an instrument never mind its nature you are underprivileged you are disenfranchised, you are underprivileged and it's true there are positives to it because I book a lot of guests through social media that otherwise are hard for me to find their emails yourself being an example I DMed you on twitter because I had trouble finding your email through just google so yeah, I mean that's one of the things that makes it hard to give up is that you are giving up legitimate positive uses of it it's just hard to isolate the positive uses without getting sucked into the toxicity and that's my problem that's how it was designed any drug pusher would tell you that's how you do it, you give free cooking for a while, then you hook the guy same with gamblers, professional gamblers they let you win a few hands, then they are all over you same with twitter, twitter gives you DM direct messaging, that's a feature the twitter makes nothing doesn't benefit twitter's bottom line but it's the lure, it's what keeps you coming yeah it's definitely the stickiest part for me is the ease of messaging and messaging people that you don't already know so yeah for sure thanks so much Sam, it was great, appreciate it yeah, enjoy the rest of your day hopefully we'll talk again but thanks for spending your time with us and enjoy the rest of your weekend thank you both of you, stay healthy you too hello Sam, good to meet you I actually watched quite a few of your videos right from a magazine in Canada it's actually been it's been edifying, it's been very good especially in the area of managing social media engagement so it's been helpful okay, great I've been a fan of yours for a while because I purchased the When Looking At Stuff Love years ago, you used to have that big package of CDs you sound like a bunch of liability lawyers to sue me for multiple offenses video, I bought your book I mean, okay let's have a class action lawsuit