 Maybe we should start talking with about the rabbit hole problem. This gentleman who I've brought a slide up of is Caleb. He posted a video here called My Descent into the alt-right pipeline. He's a major character featured in your documentary. What does Caleb's story exemplify for you? Well, it actually exemplifies that we're beyond the rabbit hole, that there was a period when the YouTube recommender algorithm was aggressively propagandizing viewers because you could go on, if you had a predilection to look at, you know, an influencer that had a certain type of rhetoric that was fairly benign, you could very quickly get recommended, much more extreme influencers and content that would, as the term illustrates, would take you down a rabbit hole. It's very difficult to get rabbit hole today. They did, in fairness to YouTube, do a lot of work on that algorithm. In fact, with Caleb kind of as a test case, we didn't put this in the films, it was pointless, but when I filmed him, which was at the Watergate Hotel because we're cheeky like that, we did a test with him where I had him go on his laptop and try to rabbit hole himself and he couldn't, the algorithm just wasn't going to do that. And so the reason I was interested in Caleb was, Caleb was already on his way towards extremist views. And YouTube and the influencers they had on there at the time, which were very aggressively extremist, like Stefan Malamue, who was a big part of the influence of the shooter in the Christ Church, New Zealand shooting, was heavily influenced by Stefan, and that got Stefan deplatformed eventually. But it was really about where we are post this rabbit hole idea, the whole idea that misinformation is so proliferate, the monetization of propaganda is so proliferate now in our current culture that we're almost all being rabbit hole or almost all sort of in a blasé way accepting of this info or flat out disinfo. And in Caleb's case, he was kind of pulled out of that extremist thinking by another person on YouTube, which was Natalie Nguyen, which we use to kind of prove a point that some of the harms are here. But a lot of the antidote for those harms can be found in the same place, can be found in YouTube itself. Yeah, at one point, you actually quote Caleb as saying, I wasn't radicalized by YouTube. I was already radicalized, but he was talking about that. The videos that he was watching killed his empathy. But then he comes across contra points as she is better known. And it's kind of fascinating that, you know, to to see YouTube is is not, you know, an engine of disaster or to the extent that it is, it also becomes an agent of empathy as well. Exactly. I think that that's really exemplifies the Internet itself. It's the it's the whole spectrum of human experience. The issues to focus on the harms and what I wanted to get out in the film was, A, I wanted to put a human face on all of these issues, because I think that's important. And that's what docs are very good at. You can read a million articles about YouTube and about social media and see a million documentaries that don't really humanize a core cast of characters that give you an emotional understanding of the issues of play. And so from the people who actually experienced it, not like actors or reenactments or something. So that was very important to me. But I also wanted to get past this idea of the algorithm, which in my opinion is kind of a diversion tactic by these monopolized tech companies to just flood you with confusing tech rhetoric that just makes the average person's eyes glaze over. And then you never get into the details of how you can maybe make these places work better. And yes, there are algorithms. And yes, there are a lot of engineers who need to be working on algorithms. But most of us are not tech engineers. Most of us are including the people who run Google and YouTube are just people with basic incentives. And it was these basic incentives that I was most interested in focusing on with this film, which in this case is their business model, which is an ad revenue based business model, which is attaches a dollar to content that holds you on platform. And to them, just like the yellow journalists of yesteryear, as we all know, the most salacious type of content is normally the most ad friendly. And that is the case with YouTube in a way that I think is problematic. So you mentioned that now things have changed and you even tried to get Caleb to rabbit hole himself and could not. Does that indicate to you that something shifted in the the incentives? Is it that the advertisers start to get uncomfortable with the kind of press that YouTube was getting? And therefore they decided to shift the algorithm? I mean, how how did the business model work to sort of correct itself in this case? It's the opposite. It's the opposite of it getting better of there being less harmful information of advertisers getting wary. What it was was that they don't need to rabbit hole you to get you to watch salacious content. Disinformation is now pervasive, right? I mean, I have friends who are on all sides of the political aisle who flirt with extremely bananas theories of either flat earth or just very cockamamie ideas about about the world that are not fact based. The sort of non fact based culture is pervasive. So you don't need the incentives aren't there to to force you algorithmically into this kind towards this kind of content. As Joe Pulitzer knew in the late 1800s, it's just human nature. Right. You are you are free. You are pre wired to connect more intensely with hyperbolic, angry, negative content than you are with middle of the road fact based content. So it actually they don't need to do that. It's really a human issue. It's a parasocial relationship of having someone looking into webcam like I'm looking at you guys and you're looking back at me. It's that very human non algorithmic parasocial component that makes YouTube so powerful. And when you when you attach that to content, then you can monetize that. Yeah, when you say it's it's negative or in hyperbolic and things like that. How does that explain the emergence of somebody like Mr. Beast on YouTube, who's one of the largest channels and characters? And it's if anything, it's relentlessly upbeat. It's like Barney, the dinosaur, you know, post you know, going through puberty or something like that. Is it actually is it negative like salacious, negative, hyperbolic? Is that the is that how they keep people watching? Or is it more catering to what people are interested in? I think it's both. I think that when you deal with with media, a media platform as big as YouTube, of which there is no larger media platform, you are going to be targeting massively disparate demographics. Mr. Beast, for instance, my middle school kid loves Mr. Beast and all of his friends in middle school of Mr. Beast. But I've never watched a single Mr. Beast video in my entire life and neither have my two older children, not one, not a single one. So you're just talking about about demographics. And I think that's where it's a business model problem because two advertisers are looking at a pie chart of numbers and they're not differentiating at all between Mr. Beast and Stephen Crowder. Right. But of course, there is a difference between Mr. Beast and Stephen Crowder, because Mr. Beast is like doing the kind of benign, you know, whatever, come in and earn a million dollars by jumping off this bridge. And Stephen Crowder is calling for civil war after the FBI goes down to Mar-a-Lago to look at Trump's classified documents. And and to an advertiser, it's just data points. It's the same. To return to the contra points, Natalie, win example for a second. Because what I find really interesting about that channel and about what Natalie is doing there is she's kind of embracing this landscape that you're describing or just like this is she's just accepting like this is the water we're swimming in. It's a very personal medium. And she just directly engages with the culture war arguments, dissects the dishonest rhetoric and kind of jumps into the arena instead of sitting on the sideline, begging YouTube to deplatform or demonetize people and does it in a very stylized way. As we can see here, this is kind of the aesthetic established that's designed to maximize engagement, kind of do what you need to do on YouTube to reach an audience and reach outside of an echo chamber and build a following. And in this case, there's evidence that that approach is an effective tactic. What is your takeaway from what the contra points channel has done? My takeaways, and I think this is Natalie's having spoken to her about it, is that you work with the tools you have. So I think when you have something that has forward, I mean, YouTube has four point six or four point seven billion video views per day. So there's a lot of people who don't have the tools at Natalie's disposal. Natalie's working with what Natalie has to be involved. I know that Natalie, that contra points is very supportive of civic engagement and civic response. So, you know, she has been able to build up a massive audience on YouTube, which is extremely rare, I would I would also add. So there it is not by any means the only tool that people should be using. Kerry Goldberg is using the tools at her disposal as a lawyer to literally create lawsuits and go after for very specific arms based on very specific issues on platform. So I think it's incumbent. I mean, my general opinion is it's all hands on deck. I think that because and to be fair to Google, including Google's hands on deck, right, and including fixes from within their own company, which are basic. I just think that we've never seen in human history. This industrial revolution, the digital technological industrial revolution that we're currently in has moved at an accelerated pace, the likes of which we've never seen. So we're all playing catch up a little bit. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Alex Winter about his new documentary, The YouTube Effect. You can watch another clip right here or the full conversation right here. Do you have an idea for a future guest or future topic? Let us know in the comments and please subscribe for notifications whenever our new videos go live. Our interviews go live every Thursday at 1 p.m. See you there.