Best of The Program | Guests: Tristan Harris & Danielle Rabkin | 9/11/20
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Hello, America and welcome to the Glen Beck program.
Today a lot on our plate.
It revolves around 9-11, who we were and who we are.
What are the problems?
Why are we so divided?
We look at a new documentary that is out, The Social Dilemma.
It's a movie that you should watch with your kids from Netflix this weekend.
It's a powerful, powerful documentary with the people who, you know, had the, you know, invented the thumbs up button on Facebook.
The people who brought advertising to
the internet, and they explain how you're being watched, monitored, how the numbers are being crunched, and how we're actually being divided intentionally,
no matter what Zuckerberg or anybody says.
Oh, no, we're trying to stop it.
No, you're not.
No, you're not, because your whole model is built on that.
We have that and so much more.
You don't want to miss a second of today's show, the Glenbeck Program.
You're listening to
the best of the Glenbeck Program.
I want to make a small correction.
Earlier, I was telling you about the words of Osama bin Laden's: I said sister, it's actually niece.
She wrote an open letter to America,
and
I want to read more of it because I find this amazing.
Now, this is Osama bin Laden's niece.
The bin Laden family,
you know, they are
very successful.
Bin Laden, Osama bin Laden, was really the black sheep of the family.
I don't know if I would still carry around the bin Laden name
myself, but that's such a Western perspective.
But she's written this letter and she lives in Switzerland.
She is known in Switzerland as somebody who wears a MAGA hat all the time.
So she's wearing...
Really?
Yeah, this letter says in full, with President Trump at America's helm, she stands a chance of restoring her principles, pride, independence, and true place in the world as a beacon for liberty and hope for all.
To me, this is what makes America great again.
Looking back at your country's foundation and preserving what truly made it great, but also knowing that the best is yet to come.
All of the achievements will be torpedoed with a bin Laden Harris presidency, and the dream of America's enemies to see her weak and on her knees will be fulfilled.
Probably a Biden-Harris presidency, right?
Bin Laden Harris.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, yeah, Biden-Harris.
She said, stand for your flag and your anthem.
Defend your history.
Don't relent in the face of those who seek to rewrite it and serve their narrative and justify the destruction of your nation.
You have so much to cherish and protect for your sake and ours.
She said, Trump has made the world a safer place since taking office.
I'm quoting, to name a few achievements, he stood up to China.
He's kept us out of new wars, made Europe comply with their NATO requirements, solidified ties with Israel, overturned the disastrous Iran deal, obliterated ISIS, took down other key terrorists, and facilitated a historic peace deal between Israel and the UAE.
Now, if anybody in the media would ever report this story, they'd say, yeah, well, look, of course, Osama bin Laden's niece, his family is all for Donald Trump.
What is she saying here?
She's saying
obliterated ISIS, got out of the Iran deal, has ties with Israel, made historic peace with Israel.
And that doesn't sound like her brother.
at all.
I mean, her uncle.
She said his administration has also made Christian Christian persecution worldwide a top priority with the State Department instituting the ministerial to advance religious freedom, the first of its kind.
Trump shows that he protects America and us in Europe by extension from foreign threats by obliterating the terrorist at the root before they get a chance to strike.
Wow.
I mean, that could have come from Kayleigh McInaney.
Yeah.
It's bin Laden's niece.
Yeah.
Amazing.
Yeah.
It's really amazing.
And I honestly,
I want to try to reach out to
liberals and Democrats, not progressive Marxists, but liberals, people
who believe in the Constitution.
They just may believe in a bigger welfare state than a typical conservative.
Somebody that feels the country is in trouble and you don't like Donald Trump.
I get it.
I get it.
And even if we vote differently, I get it.
But
we have to have conversations
with liberals and with Democrats and just say,
how are we missing each other on this one?
How are we...
Because
the country is
being sold down the river.
I can't believe it's only conservatives that still believe in the flag flag and the military.
Did you hear what happened in California?
In California, I think this is, this is who we are.
300 campers were out in one of the state parks and they were trapped by the fire.
And the California fire said,
there's no hope.
We can't get in.
It's way too dangerous.
There's no way for us to rescue you guys.
300, 300 campers.
And they said, jump in the lake to survive.
You've got to just go into the lake, put your head underwater.
That's the only way you guys are going to make it.
Well, then, Army pilots found out about it.
And so the U.S.
military said, we'll go in.
California Fire said it was too dangerous.
The
military crews go in.
There was zero visibility in the canyon, zero visibility.
The
overload with people on these helicopters was also really, really dangerous.
Are people going to overload it?
Is it going to crash?
None of it happened.
They went in with zero visibility.
They went to the lake and they rescued 300 people.
They went in
and then they got survivors and went out and then went back in again, got more survivors and got out.
This is who we are.
We are people that we don't care.
They didn't card people, who are you voting for?
They didn't care.
We're Americans.
And we have such little pride right now that we're not even talking about the heroes like these guys, absolute heroes that remembered we're all Americans.
And Americans don't leave Americans behind.
We don't say, oh, it's too dangerous.
I don't hold this against the fire, you know, the California fire, because they don't have military experience and helos like the federal government does.
So I'm not saying anything bad.
I'm not calling the firefighters anything bad.
I'm just saying
we do things in America.
We do things.
We've spent a lot of time, a lot of money, and
we've shed a lot of blood to be able to do amazing things.
Can we step and just recognize it for a minute?
It's a great idea.
I mean, I kept coming back to that thought today as we sit here on 9-11 and the 19th anniversary.
All this anti-cop stuff we've been taking in lately
kind of puts you in a different place on that, doesn't it?
Obviously, I think this audience is generally pro-police and doesn't put up with that nonsense, but it's been so commonplace over the past few months to just basically say all cops are bad, all cops ACAB.
And you know what?
That's not what that stands for.
We made the other,
we went too far the other way on September 11th.
We said all cops are good.
No, not all cops are good.
Not all cops are bad.
Cops,
military, everything.
It's a section of society.
All cops are us.
They're us.
Some are good, some are bad.
You root out the bad ones and you elevate the good ones.
We're not doing that anymore.
Instead, it's just all cops are bad.
All cops.
I mean, remember, people all over the country were wearing like NYPD t-shirts and hats.
Couldn't keep them in stock.
Yeah.
And now we're told they're just these evil people that basically just show up everywhere and just try to kill minorities.
Well, now people are losing their job just for supporting cops online.
But
yeah.
There's been a couple of professors who have said good things about police officers.
You got fired for it.
Well,
wow.
Have we come that far that you can't even say anything good about police?
You can't.
I remember the 4th of July celebrations that
people were pissed off about.
You can't celebrate the nation anymore.
No.
Yeah.
No, no, I'm saying no.
And I know you believe this too.
No, not on my watch.
Right.
Exactly.
Not on my watch.
And it's, look,
next week, we are going to tell you an outline how America could very well be in civil war by Christmas.
It is being plotted and planned and either side could start it.
The crazy right-wing groups, which I think there's maybe 12 members of,
but they are.
They are just as interested in destroying America.
I mean, Richard Spencer is a socialist.
So he is just as
motivated to destroy America as the far left is.
So
there are all kinds of people.
And all it needs is just a little shove.
But we have got to find the people who we don't agree with
that we can actually talk to and say, we've got to keep our heads.
We've got to keep our heads and remember who we are.
Eric Weinstein, you know who he is, right?
He's the lefty professor up in Oregon that was, I mean, he's as left as they come.
He tweeted after the fire story, he tweeted, I miss heroic official behavior.
I miss heroic official behavior.
I also miss rule breaking for the greater good.
Can you imagine being an abandoned abandon in a lake
and seeing a chopper with an American flag coming to pick you up,
piloted by actual Americans who remember what the hell that even means,
rather than whatever it is that's tearing us apart?
That should be our goal.
I call on you to reflect
on the last
19 years
and where we were and who we were and what we knew to be true
and then look at what has torn us apart
and are there things with people that you don't vote the same way, are there neighbors that are just afraid just as afraid of talking to you as you might be to them
because they think you're an extremist that's just going to yell at them, or you think they're an extremist, it's just going to yell at you.
Well, some of them might,
but we're all feeling how close we are to the edge.
Reach out to anybody you think and don't try to win.
Just say, we got to keep our heads.
I don't care how you vote.
We got to keep our heads.
Because if it's a fair election, we'll be okay.
But the way this is being set up, it is being set up to cause people on both sides to feel like it was unfair
and this will be our undoing that this election will be our undoing if we don't remember who we are so take today to remember where we were what we went through, how many lives have been lost to protect this country and to save our principles and our Constitution.
The treasure that we have spent and the blood that we have all spent over the last 19 years, it cannot be for naught today
because we're all pissed and not talking to each other.
Remember who you were on September 12th.
Remember the 9-12 project.
Remember who you were the next day.
You were kind.
You were generous.
We were in it together.
Race didn't matter.
Status didn't matter.
Religion, politics, none of it mattered.
Because in the end, we all realized we're Americans.
Find those Americans that still remember
what the hell that means.
you're listening to the best of the Glenn Beck program.
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You know, we're just talking about the difference between coming together at 9-11 and coming together over COVID-19 and how it's not happening.
And, you know, our guest said, well, there's a couple of reasons.
The masks and social distancing of being locked up, you know, where we're we're not with each other.
And Stu and I were talking about we have a few new people that have joined us here on the stage.
I have met them.
I work with them every day.
I would not recognize them on the street if they didn't have a mask on because they're wearing masks the whole time.
And I've no idea what they look like.
I mean, you don't know people in the mask.
You lose that connection.
But I also seem to think there's a big difference in our media than there was in 2000.
Social media was not a thing, and that's ever so destructive.
And the other is we're in election.
We're three years away from an election.
And gee, when did that unity start going away?
About the election time.
All right, I want to talk a little bit about what's happening in California.
In California, you know, we know the Nancy Pelosi,
you know, blow my hair out
scandal where she just called up a salon and said, Hey, I need you to, you know, blow dry my hair and make me look nice.
And the owner of the salon was so upset because, wait a minute, I can't open my salon, but you can just come in and get a haircut?
And we've got another situation like that.
This is Danielle Rabkin.
She is the owner of the CrossFit Golden Gate gym.
And I want you to hear her story.
She's got this unbelievable gym where she could social distance people by 30 feet and have them wear masks.
She's not allowed to open, but the state has opened the state gyms.
Welcome to the program, Danielle.
Good morning.
So
tell me what's happening in San Francisco.
It's been pretty unbelievable.
It's been the hardest six months of my life.
We have been pretty closed still.
I don't know that the rest of the country realizes we're almost still entirely on lockdown.
The only things open are outdoor dining, indoor retail.
I think that's pretty much it.
San Francisco has incredible COVID metrics.
When I checked yesterday morning, we only had 88 COVID deaths since March.
We have never had more than 38 COVID ICU patients at a time since day one.
Our hospitals were so empty in the early days waiting for the surge that never came, which is wonderful, but we were cutting back nursing hours, doctors' shifts, giving salary cuts because hospitals were bleeding money.
So we've been in really good shape to flatten the curve.
And somewhere along the line, flattening the curve turned into flattening the local economy because we've just kept everything closed
and
I my personal life and livelihood has just been completely burned to the ground I've spent over eight years building this business and I'm watching it just completely fall apart before my eyes San Francisco has experienced a mass exodus people are leaving left and right if they're going to be locked down they want more space they want cheaper rent but as other parts of the country continue to open up why do people want to be here?
Of course they don't.
Tech can work remote.
There's no reason to stay somewhere where you can't get a haircut or go to the gym.
You know, it's just been so extremely frustrating.
Even the Tony Fauci's of the world say that prolonged closures will cause irreparable damage.
So it's just been mind-blowing to me why this has been going on.
Okay, so
tell me first,
the state has opened their gyms.
Are these publicly financed gyms or are these gyms for state workers and city workers these are publicly financed gyms taxpayer dollars so i know with certainty that at the end of the june sorry at the end of june police station gyms were closed a good friend of mine is a police officer and i know that his gym was shut so I really hesitated to build an outdoor gym in my neighborhood.
The streets are not clean here.
The air is smoky.
It's just not a great setup for outdoor activity, which is what we're moving towards.
But I finally bit the bullet and did it.
And recently I saw a couple of police officers at the end of my block and I'm thinking, all right, I know that their gym is shut.
I got this.
I'm going to get them to come work out
at my outdoor gym with me.
So two weeks ago, I go up to them and I kit chatting and I say, Hey, what are you guys doing for workouts these days?
And they tell me that their station gym has reopened.
And I about fell over.
I couldn't believe it.
Here I am suffering with prolonged closure and I find out that their gym has reopened.
So I immediately reach out to a friend of mine
who is an attorney
and works out of a courthouse in the city and I say, does this set a precedent for me?
What does this mean?
They've told me Cal OSHA has inspected their gyms.
Can I get a Cal OSHA inspection?
And he says, oh yeah, I know that paralegals have been working out at the Hall of Justice.
And I couldn't believe it, Glenn.
It takes me everything to not drop 20 S bombs right now.
I could not believe it.
Here
I am, business owners like me, still shut, and paralegals are working out at indoor gyms funded by taxpayer dollars.
So I actually go down to the Hall of Justice to check out these gyms, and I see notices on the door saying that they've been reopened since July 1st.
Limited occupancy, new COVID rules, new sign-in sheets.
So we send it to the press.
I was trying to reach out through a city attorney, through my supervisor's office, through the Office of Economic Workforce and Development.
Why is this happening?
Why am I still closed?
Does this mean I can reopen?
Does this set a precedent for me?
I want to be very clear.
I don't want to see these gyms shut down, but what are the implications for gym owners like myself?
Right.
Because the PPP money, the PPP money is long gone, and it probably didn't help.
San Francisco, I can't even imagine what you are paying in rent for a 4,700 square foot gym.
No, you don't want to know.
I know.
It was unbelievable to me to see articles about people throughout the country having windfalls with the CARES Act $600 a week.
And, you know, there being debate over them wanting to incentivize people to go back to work.
And I'm thinking, $600 a week doesn't even pay for the rent at my one-bedroom apartment.
And there are people, you know, gathering savings from that.
This isn't right.
San Francisco is extremely expensive.
There are businesses across the country that got the same PPP loans that we got.
They weren't ever closed.
Maybe they were closed for one month, and we've been closed for six months.
Where's our help?
If the city wants me to stay closed, they can start paying my rent.
Because, as you said, it's not cheap.
I'm many, many tens of thousands of dollars in debt to my landlord now because of this.
So,
if I may voice what I think some Americans may be saying, and that is,
why would we pay for, why would we take my tax dollars that I'm working hard for and send them to a state that is absolutely out of control,
on fire, literally and figuratively.
And they're screwing their own people.
I don't know why,
but they're screwing their own people.
And
I think Americans really feel for people who
are trapped in this,
but it's kind of like, you know, this is what everybody in San Francisco voted for.
I get it, and I've heard that a lot, but the reality of the situation is that small business owners like myself, we are where we are.
People voted in who they voted in.
This is the situation now, and we need help.
I've never, admittedly, I have not followed local politics and that's my own fault and you sure as hell better believe it's the learning experience.
But
the decision makers right now aren't just the local politicians.
It's the Department of Public Health.
And well, I don't know how your Department of Public Health can say that working outside, working out outside is safer for you.
I mean,
the entire state is on fire.
Smoke has to be.
I mean, California wildfire smoke was at my home in Idaho last weekend.
Idaho.
It's got to be in San Francisco.
Glenn, I completely agree with you, and I've been trying to push that up the chain for weeks.
I have human feces on the sidewalk next to my outdoor gym.
We are dealing with extremely poor air quality.
I've been trying to push.
for an indoor reopening for a very long time and my voice just isn't loud enough.
In an interesting turn of events, two weeks ago, of course, as soon as I found out about these courthouse gyms reopening,
you know, we've been pushing this up to change the supervisor's Office of Economic Workforce and Development.
Just yesterday,
public health officers announced that they were shutting down the city gym.
And I want to be very clear, that was not the goal.
But within minutes, they've announced that gyms, hair salons, and tattoos can now reopen on Monday.
It is unbelievable to me.
Maybe it shouldn't be so unbelievable that it took something like this to get it to happen.
So, wait, wait, wait.
So, they are letting you open on Monday
because of the discovery of these city gyms.
They just announced yesterday that they're letting
open on Monday.
Well, congratulations on that.
I mean, I don't know.
We're living in a time now where
many of these people are rulers.
They're not just politicians.
They're not people that were protecting our rights.
They're just rulers.
And this Nancy Pelosi thing at her hair salon,
are people in San Francisco waking up and saying, wait a minute, this is,
or are they still just as crazy?
It's a good question.
I can't answer for you, but it certainly has not felt like a democracy to me lately.
It's very difficult to feel like your voice isn't heard.
I'm curious to know if the mayor has been using these gyms,
these police station gyms, if her name is in the logbooks.
Wow.
We put out a records request, and I don't know if they'll try to keep those names public, but I think it'll be very interesting to see if her name is on there between
March and September.
Danielle,
I feel for you.
I mean, I live in Texas, and things are still crazy here.
Not like that, but even in Texas.
And
there is,
you know, when you have about 600 people in 10 days
in a country of 350 million dying in those 10 days.
That's the last 10, I think, has been about 600 people nationwide.
350 million.
And we are shutting and destroying our economy.
It makes no sense.
And you have to ask yourself, what's the real agenda here?
Because this is doing far more damage to our children.
to our psyche and to our economy.
People like you.
I mean, how long is it going to take for you to recover?
Yeah, I don't know if I will, to be honest, and it's devastating to me.
I can tell you that San Francisco is letting the local economy burn to the ground.
I don't know that anywhere else is as severe here where reopenings can be done safely, slowly, and cautiously.
They need to start moving forward.
Thank you so much, Danielle.
I appreciate you speaking out.
Thanks for coming on the show.
This is the best of the Glenn Beck program.
And don't forget, rate us on iTunes.
There is another
video or documentary out right now that is so well worth watching and watching with your kids.
And it really kind of stars Tristan Harris.
He's the best one in it, I think.
He's called the closest thing to Silicon Valley that Silicon Valley has to a conscience.
He is a former Google design ethicist.
He is now working on the problems that are being caused by social media.
Welcome to the program, Tristan.
How are you?
It's great to be back.
Thank you for having me.
So in the social dilemma, I mean, it is really quite clear
that they are profiting off of the divide, even though they're saying they're trying to heal us.
That's exactly right.
You know, I'm really concerned with the fact that
how can you do anything when our fellow countrymen disagree vehemently across all topics that matter, right?
I mean, how can you fix anything if at least half of the world violently opposes the idea and will counter every strategy that you do?
This film is the first time that the
people who built some of these products, the inventor of the Facebook like button, the person who built the YouTube recommendation system, the guy who brought the advertising business model to Facebook, Jaron Lanier, the father of virtual reality, are on camera saying, look, these are the harms that it's causing.
First to children and the problems of addiction and the breakdown of the family that we all know that I'm sure that so many parents are struggling with, especially in COVID times when you have your kid on Zoom calls, right?
I mean, I know how deep this is.
And the mental health issues there.
But then the second is on the polarization.
And that's what I'm really most concerned about.
Because as you just said, they profit from the divide.
Because no matter what topic that there is, social media will take the most egregious and extreme and worst part of that topic and show it to your outgroup, to the other side, in the least charitable way, which means that we're all biased in a worse way about each other, right?
And it's driving us crazy, and it's actually killing our democracy if we don't actually fix it.
And what I'm really hoping is that if enough people see this film, we'll have a new shared truth about the breakdown of our shared truth and reality.
And that's really what we're hoping for.
Okay, so by the way, if you don't know what we're talking about, it is a new movie on Netflix called The Social Dilemma.
I think you break it down really, really well, and it is very credible
in its approach.
And because everybody who's in it
is pretty much legendary.
I mean, they were there, they invented it.
However, the problem is, and I mean,
I try to listen to, well, I do, I listen to two podcasts every day
that disagree with me.
I don't necessarily listen to anything that agrees with me.
I read a lot, but I read all sides.
And
I'm surprised on both sides, how many people
don't know how a story was covered by the other sides.
A lot of people, let's just take on the right.
A lot of people say the New York Times never covered that.
Well, they did.
They did.
They may have covered it differently.
They may have covered it one day or on page 18 where the right was saying this is a front page story, but they did cover it.
And I'm shocked at how many people
on both sides
don't know what the other side is being fed.
Yeah.
Well, it's because, as you said at the beginning of the hour,
these companies profit by showing you your own Truman show, your own affirming view of reality.
Because imagine there's two news feeds at Facebook, right?
One called the Everything You Believe is Right feed, right?
And it just shows you more and more news from your side that basically gets you to click on it more.
And there's another feed called the Everything You Know Might Be Different Than What You Know.
We're going to show you news that challenges your views constantly.
You can imagine they could easily find two different sets of stories to show you which one is going to do better for their business model of capturing your attention.
The one that you like.
The one that affirms your view of reality, the one that you like.
And so the problem is, each of us have been given our own Truman show, our own reality, right?
Where it's not that everything that we're believing is wrong, we've just been seeing a tiny, tiny, tiny sliver, and it's actually infected the rest of the media because even cable news or radio news, where do they get their news from?
Well, they get their news from Twitter as well, right?
So Twitter
is the basis, this divisive force, is the basis that's feeding into all forms of media, And it's making us all bias in a worse and worse
way.
That's what we've got to fix that.
So we've talked about this many times, that we don't want to get news off of Twitter because it seems like journalists are not doing real journalism.
They're reacting to Twitter.
That's right.
It's turned all of us into little monkeys that react impulsively to the latest thing.
And whatever media ethics or journalism or training that we might have had in a previous generation, that goes out the window when I win, the faster I make an assertion about what the other side did.
Yes.
And I say something without actually stopping and holding.
Because if I don't do it, the other guy will.
So it's a race to the bottom of the brainstem, a race to the immediate who can say it first.
But that just means that exponential hearsay, exponential gossip.
And it doesn't lead to good sense making, right?
And if we cannot agree and it just leads to violence and really escalating towards levels of violence that I think people are worried about civil war, that's not actually productive.
And by the way, way, our enemies are using this right now against us, right?
I mean, they actually want us to just sit here fighting with each other.
After World War II, you know, with the big powers with nukes, you can't actually wage a conventional war anymore.
So you want to use subtler methods with plausible deniability, proxy wars.
But if you're Russia and China, Iran, Turkey, or North Korea, you know, you're not going to launch a nuke against us, right?
But you might want to take the existing tensions and turn the enemy against itself.
And that's what Sun Tzu exactly would say to do.
That's what the Chinese military strategy is.
And Facebook makes this a trillion times easier.
So if I'm China, I want the extreme right and the extreme left to proliferate and fight each other and would be stoked about the rise of extremist groups on all sides.
So let me ask you, Tristan, because here's the problem
from the right point of view, from the conservative point of view.
And that is
we don't have any billion-dollar, hundred-year-old institutions like the New York Times.
Fox News, a lot of conservatives are just
not even watching Fox News anymore.
They're tired of a lot of the stuff.
And
when you have a group of people, let's say the Blaze, where we really, I'm not saying all of our stories are perfect or anything else, but we really try to look into things.
And for instance, I'm saying right now about civil war, there are people that want civil war.
They do want to tear the country apart.
I can tell you what the groups are.
I think
they are on the left, but there are also, as I said yesterday, there are also people who, like Richard Spencer, you think the Nazis and the white supremacists don't want a civil war?
They don't want freedom either.
And same with the outside.
But
if I say
what MSNBC is now saying about civil war, and they're saying that it's all coming from white supremacy.
But I say, well, yes, there might be some white supremacists that want that, but there's also these organizations that want it.
Antiphos in the street calling for the destruction of America.
I'm somehow or another
unreasonable.
How do we bridge that?
Well, this is the thing.
So, you know, are there reasonable versions of each thing that's going on?
You know, are there new patriot movements where people are learning the Constitution, learning how to do homesteading?
You know, absolutely.
But then there's also accelerationists orienting towards civil war.
And which side is social media going to expose?
They're going to take a tiny percent of the worst side, and they're going to expose them in a statistically much bigger and greater way of the evil parts, missing the good parts, to the other side, right?
And that's going to disproportionately create a counter-response by the other side that says, well, if they're going to do that, then we're going to escalate this.
And then that's also going to take the least represented, most extreme view on, say, the left, on Antifa, right?
And so, and I'm not saying that
there's real legitimate problems on both sides here, but the problem is that it's selecting for the worst of us and making us hate each other.
And by the way, we're not going to get anything done as a country
when that happens.
I mean, and do you think that when we're sort of devolved into conflict with ourselves, that our adversaries just sit around and
handle things inside their own countries, or do they want to take advantage of it?
And I think
there's this line that while we've been obsessed with protecting our physical borders, we left the digital border wide open.
Because if Russia are trying to try to fly
a bomb or a cruise missile into the United States, they'll get shot down by the Department of Defense.
But when they try to fly an information missile into the United States, they're met by a Facebook algorithm that says, yeah, exactly, which zip code or personality do you want to target?
And they make it as easy as possible because the digital border is wide open.
So
they say, all of them say, they're trying to stop and suppress hatred and the division, et cetera, et cetera.
So is any of that true?
Well, I think that they've been very slow on waking up to these problems, Glenn.
And that's actually why I think, and I'm not saying this as a self-promoter, I think the film is important for this reason.
Because at this point, the tech companies can't just fix what all of us are thinking and believing.
We're 10 years in to this social media washing machine that split us apart into these two different, almost like a, what do you call the centrifuges?
You know, you spin them around, right?
And they split us apart on two completely different sides.
I think the only way to actually reverse that is to have a new cultural understanding about how this hypnotic induction took place.
And I don't mean we've each been hypnotized to believe something is wrong.
I mean each of us have been hypnotized into these different bubbles of reality that are not compatible with each other.
And I'm really hoping that the film can actually, again, create a shared truth about the breakdown of our shared truth.
And so far, it seems to be
working really well at having people say, you know, I want to have a conversation with my family.
And the best thing, by the way, you can do, if you see the film, is watch it with your family members, especially who might have different political beliefs than you.
And after you watch it, exchange, open up Facebook on both your phones and exchange your phone and look at the other person's news feed.
And you will be surprised that even with the same friends, because you're probably your husband or wife or whatever, you have many similar friends, you will see a completely different feed.
which will show you, imagine if I was living in that world for the last 10 years.
Well, of course that person would be, say, concerned about climate change because their entire feed is so good with climate change stories.
On the other side, of course, that person would be like, we got to do something about Black Lives Matter because they just see infinite evidence of just people looting and rioting on the streets, right?
And that's the thing: we can't really see this because we've been so narrowly trapped in these realities.
And it really isn't an issue that can unite us because the whole thing is meant to divide us.
Tristan, I'm very glad that people like you exist.
I've talked to Ray Kurzweil about
ethics in Silicon Valley for a while.
He scares the hell out of me.
And I had
been praying for 20 years that Ethicist would wake up and start to really guide these companies.
I hope it's not too late.
I don't think it is.
But thank you for everything that you're doing.
The documentary, and you should watch it with your family.
Watch it with your whole family.
It's called The Social Dilemma.
It's not only going to show you how we're being divided, but it'll show you, if you aren't convinced you're being watched and spied on, boy, you will understand why and what's really going on.
It's the social dilemma, and it's on Netflix now.
Tristan, thank you so much.
We'll talk again.
Thank you so much, Claude.