if you’re doing with an addictive
generation this is up being time bomb
ticking this is no accident indeed it is
by design I mean seriously
it was my mistake I mean I think we can
all feel it to try to make these
we now know that many of the major
social media companies hire individuals
called attention engineers who borrow
principals from Las Vegas casino
gambling among other places to try to
make these products as addictive as
possible that is the desired use case of
these products is that you use it in an
addictive fashion because that maximizes
the profit that can be extracted from
your attention and data it literally is
a point now
where I think we have created tools that
are ripping apart the social fabric of
how society works that is truly where we
are the way the technologists Garan
lunaire puts it is that these companies
offer you shiny treats in exchange for
minutes of your attention and bytes of
your personal data which can then be
packaged up and sold what happened is
that the attention economy in this race
for attention got more and more
competitive and the more competitive it
got to get people’s attention on its a
news website the more they need to add
these design principles is more
manipulative design tactics as ways of
holding on to your attention you don’t
realize it but you are being programmed
social media tools are designed to be
addictive the actual design desired use
case of these tools is that you fragment
your attention as much as possible
throughout your waking hours that’s how
these tools are designed to use well we
have a growing amount of research which
tells us that if you spend large
portions of your day in a state of
fragmented attention so large portions
of your day we are constantly breaking
up your attention to take a quick glance
to just check them just quickly look at
Instagram that this can permanently
reduce your capacity for concentration I
am especially worried about this when we
look at the younger generation coming up
which is the most saturated this
technology it’s very addictive because
if you pull on the slot machine arm
enough you will win
and you never know which fool will
that’s an addictive behavior and it’s
dopamine that is driving that addiction
so what happens with social media is
Robert Sapolsky – the foundational
research on this Stanford calls it the
magic of maybe when you look at your
phone and maybe there’s a text there and
maybe there’s not and you don’t know
when it shows up that high you get
that’s dopamine it’s the magic maybe
maybe it’ll be there maybe it won’t when
it shows up
maybe they 400 cents spike in dopamine
that is roughly the same amount of
dopamine as you’re getting from cocaine
slightly less than an extremely
addictive drug like cocaine and that’s
what’s happening we really care what
other people think of us so for example
you know when you upload a new photo a
new profile photo of yourself on
Facebook that’s a moment where our mind
is very vulnerable to knowing what other
people think of my new profile photo and
so when we get new likes on our profile
photo Facebook knowing this could
actually message me and say oh you have
new likes on your profile photo and we
it knows that we’ll be vulnerable to
that moment because we all really care
about when we’re tagged in a photo or
when we have a new profile photo and the
thing is that they control the dial the
technology companies control the dial
for when and how long your profile photo
shows up on other people’s newsfeeds so
they can orchestrate it so that other
people more often end up liking your
profile photo over a delayed period of
time for example so that you end up
having to more frequently come back and
see what the new likes are and it’s
literally rewiring our brain even social
media the challenges you know with these
terms like Facebook depression and
everything because it’s that
this is social media depression because
where’s everyone’s looking at their feed
and they’re comparing their lives to
other people that they’re highlights of
other people’s lives and there’s
actually less satisfaction or sadness
depression and stuff like that and it’s
interesting because if you think about
things like things that you know
routinely produced a lot of dopamine
alcohol for example there’s a drinking
age right we have a drinking it the
alcohol releases a whole lot of dopamine
it makes you feel really really good we
say okay you can have that but you’ve
gotta wait you’ve got to be 21 years old
we don’t do that with social media were
you know essentially putting highly
addictive drugs into the hands of kids
before they have any natural defenses
against them and what you’re seeing with
Internet addiction with social media
it’s the same thing over and over to
people trying to change their state of
consciousness with a device trying to
get at the underlying neural chemical
chemistry and it’s very very addictive
so I would say the problem with the
gadgets and I mean they’re amazing
things is that they interfere with they
approximately interfere with medium to
long term goals I would say and so I
think the first thing you have to do to
bring them under control is figure out
what it is that their use is interfering
with it has to be something important so
you think well I want to do something
important what is that it could be
personal maybe you want to have a
relationship gonna get married you want
to have kids you want to have a career
that’s meaningful you know you wanna
have a life you want to have an
Abrahamic adventure and be the father of
Nations let’s say we can’t be ratting
away on your cell phone and doing that
and so I think I think part of it is to
set your sights high and make a plan and
figure out who you could be and see if
obsessive utilization of smartphone fits
into that vision of nobility and it will
partly because they’re they’re
unbelievably powerful communication
devices but so so often it’s
it’s for lack of something better to do
and it also interferes you know and
imagine like when you take that to the
extreme where you know bad actors can
now manipulate large swathes of people
to do anything you want it’s just a it’s
a really really bad state of affairs and
we compound the problem right we curate
our lives around this perceived sense of
perfection because we get rewarded in
these short-term signals hearts likes
thumbs up and we conflate that with
value and we conflated with truth and
instead what it really is is fake
brittle popularity that’s short-term and
that leaves you even more and admit it
vacant and empty before you did it
because then it forces you into this
vicious cycle where you’re like what’s
the next thing I need to do now because
I need it back
think about that compounded by two
billion people and then think about how
people react then to the perceptions of
others it’s just a it’s really bad so we
know from the research literature that
the more you use social media the more
likely you are to feel lonely or
isolated we know that the constant
exposure to your friends carefully
curated positive portrayals of their
life and leave you to feel inadequate
and can increase rates of depression
and something I think we’re gonna be
hearing more about in the near future I
said there’s a fundamental mismatch
between the way our brains are wired and
this behavior of exposing yourself to
stimuli with intermittent rewards
throughout all of your waking hours so
it’s one thing to spend a couple hours
at the slot machine in Las Vegas but if
you bring the slot machine with you and
you pull that handle all day long from
when you wake up that when you go to bed
we’re not wired from it it’s short
circuits to brain we’re starting to find
that it has actual cognitive
consequences one of them being the sort
of pervasive background hum of anxiety
here’s the thing the world we live in
isn’t real social media isn’t real and
by design social media rewards us for
showing our best life the edited posed
champagne Michelin star holiday
orchestrated best angle of our life the
highlight reel but you don’t ever see
real life the 99% of our lives the
behind the scenes that unglamorous
unfiltered day-to-day bland normality
and you end up comparing your
behind-the-scenes to other people’s fake
highlight reel and using others as a
mirror
benchmark for how you should look how
successful you should be or how you
should live these fake comparisons will
only serve to make you feel inadequate
and inferior to something that isn’t
even real research continually shows
that comparing your life to someone
else’s creates envy low self confidence
low self-esteem and depression you
compare yourself to other people every
single day consciously or subconsciously
and no matter what I say you’re not
going to stop because comparing one
thing to another is a natural human
thing to do whether we want to admit it
or not a big reason why anything has
value is because there’s something worse
all better to compare it to think about
it an old brick of a mobile phone with a
big aerial is only considered amazing in
a world before the smartphone
the horse and carriage is only
considered a phenomenal mode of
transport until the car comes along the
answer isn’t to stop making comparisons
because unfortunately we can’t control
that but you have to change the object
of your comparison from someone else to
yourself you have to measure yourself
against yourself and by doing this you
start a base point where you consider
yourself to be perfectly fine exactly
how you are but it also is the most
effective motivating and healthy way to
work to improve yourself you’ll become
you’ll happy yourself when you stop
putting pressure on yourself to be more
like someone else and when you start
comparing real to real we are in a
really bad state of affairs right now in
my opinion it is it is eroding the core
foundations of how people behave by and
between each other and I don’t have a
good solution you know my solution is I
just don’t use these tools anymore I
have it for years it’s created huge
tension with my friends huge tensions in
my social circles if you look at like
you know my facebook fee if I probably
haven’t I posted maybe two times in
seven years three times five times thing
just it’s less than 10
[Music]
and it’s weird I guess I kind of just
innately didn’t want to get programmed
and so I just turned tuned it out but I
didn’t confront it and now to see what’s
happening it’s really it really it
really bums me up back in the 1970s in
the early 80s at Xerox PARC when Steve
Jobs first went over and saw the
graphical user interface the way people
talked about influence the world was a
bicycle for our minds that here we are
you take you take a human being and they
have a certain set of capacities and
capabilities and then you give them a
bicycle and they can go to all these new
distances they’re empowered to go to
these brand new places and to do these
new things to have these new capacities
and that’s always been the philosophy of
people who make technologies how do we
create bicycles for our minds to do and
empower us to feel and access more now
when the first iPhone was introduced it
was also the philosophy Bank of these
technology how do we empower people to
do something more and what and in those
days it wasn’t manipulative because
there was no competition for attention
Photoshop wasn’t trying to maximize how
much attention it took from you it
didn’t measure success that way and the
Internet overall had been in the very
beginning not designed to maximize
attention it was just a putting things
out there putting things out there
creating these message boards it wasn’t
designed with this whole persuasive
psychology that it burns later if you
feed the Beast that beast will destroy
you if you push back on it we have a
chance to control it rein it in and it
is a point in time where people need to
hard break from some of these tools and
the things that you rely on the short
term dopamine driven feedback loops that
we have created are destroying how
society works no civil discourse no
cooperation misinformation miss truth
and it’s not an American problem this is
not about Russian ads this is a global
problem
mr. Zuckerberg would you be comfortable
sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night
generation this is up being time bomb
ticking this is no accident indeed it is
by design I mean seriously
it was my mistake I mean I think we can
all feel it to try to make these
we now know that many of the major
social media companies hire individuals
called attention engineers who borrow
principals from Las Vegas casino
gambling among other places to try to
make these products as addictive as
possible that is the desired use case of
these products is that you use it in an
addictive fashion because that maximizes
the profit that can be extracted from
your attention and data it literally is
a point now
where I think we have created tools that
are ripping apart the social fabric of
how society works that is truly where we
are the way the technologists Garan
lunaire puts it is that these companies
offer you shiny treats in exchange for
minutes of your attention and bytes of
your personal data which can then be
packaged up and sold what happened is
that the attention economy in this race
for attention got more and more
competitive and the more competitive it
got to get people’s attention on its a
news website the more they need to add
these design principles is more
manipulative design tactics as ways of
holding on to your attention you don’t
realize it but you are being programmed
social media tools are designed to be
addictive the actual design desired use
case of these tools is that you fragment
your attention as much as possible
throughout your waking hours that’s how
these tools are designed to use well we
have a growing amount of research which
tells us that if you spend large
portions of your day in a state of
fragmented attention so large portions
of your day we are constantly breaking
up your attention to take a quick glance
to just check them just quickly look at
Instagram that this can permanently
reduce your capacity for concentration I
am especially worried about this when we
look at the younger generation coming up
which is the most saturated this
technology it’s very addictive because
if you pull on the slot machine arm
enough you will win
and you never know which fool will
that’s an addictive behavior and it’s
dopamine that is driving that addiction
so what happens with social media is
Robert Sapolsky – the foundational
research on this Stanford calls it the
magic of maybe when you look at your
phone and maybe there’s a text there and
maybe there’s not and you don’t know
when it shows up that high you get
that’s dopamine it’s the magic maybe
maybe it’ll be there maybe it won’t when
it shows up
maybe they 400 cents spike in dopamine
that is roughly the same amount of
dopamine as you’re getting from cocaine
slightly less than an extremely
addictive drug like cocaine and that’s
what’s happening we really care what
other people think of us so for example
you know when you upload a new photo a
new profile photo of yourself on
Facebook that’s a moment where our mind
is very vulnerable to knowing what other
people think of my new profile photo and
so when we get new likes on our profile
photo Facebook knowing this could
actually message me and say oh you have
new likes on your profile photo and we
it knows that we’ll be vulnerable to
that moment because we all really care
about when we’re tagged in a photo or
when we have a new profile photo and the
thing is that they control the dial the
technology companies control the dial
for when and how long your profile photo
shows up on other people’s newsfeeds so
they can orchestrate it so that other
people more often end up liking your
profile photo over a delayed period of
time for example so that you end up
having to more frequently come back and
see what the new likes are and it’s
literally rewiring our brain even social
media the challenges you know with these
terms like Facebook depression and
everything because it’s that
this is social media depression because
where’s everyone’s looking at their feed
and they’re comparing their lives to
other people that they’re highlights of
other people’s lives and there’s
actually less satisfaction or sadness
depression and stuff like that and it’s
interesting because if you think about
things like things that you know
routinely produced a lot of dopamine
alcohol for example there’s a drinking
age right we have a drinking it the
alcohol releases a whole lot of dopamine
it makes you feel really really good we
say okay you can have that but you’ve
gotta wait you’ve got to be 21 years old
we don’t do that with social media were
you know essentially putting highly
addictive drugs into the hands of kids
before they have any natural defenses
against them and what you’re seeing with
Internet addiction with social media
it’s the same thing over and over to
people trying to change their state of
consciousness with a device trying to
get at the underlying neural chemical
chemistry and it’s very very addictive
so I would say the problem with the
gadgets and I mean they’re amazing
things is that they interfere with they
approximately interfere with medium to
long term goals I would say and so I
think the first thing you have to do to
bring them under control is figure out
what it is that their use is interfering
with it has to be something important so
you think well I want to do something
important what is that it could be
personal maybe you want to have a
relationship gonna get married you want
to have kids you want to have a career
that’s meaningful you know you wanna
have a life you want to have an
Abrahamic adventure and be the father of
Nations let’s say we can’t be ratting
away on your cell phone and doing that
and so I think I think part of it is to
set your sights high and make a plan and
figure out who you could be and see if
obsessive utilization of smartphone fits
into that vision of nobility and it will
partly because they’re they’re
unbelievably powerful communication
devices but so so often it’s
it’s for lack of something better to do
and it also interferes you know and
imagine like when you take that to the
extreme where you know bad actors can
now manipulate large swathes of people
to do anything you want it’s just a it’s
a really really bad state of affairs and
we compound the problem right we curate
our lives around this perceived sense of
perfection because we get rewarded in
these short-term signals hearts likes
thumbs up and we conflate that with
value and we conflated with truth and
instead what it really is is fake
brittle popularity that’s short-term and
that leaves you even more and admit it
vacant and empty before you did it
because then it forces you into this
vicious cycle where you’re like what’s
the next thing I need to do now because
I need it back
think about that compounded by two
billion people and then think about how
people react then to the perceptions of
others it’s just a it’s really bad so we
know from the research literature that
the more you use social media the more
likely you are to feel lonely or
isolated we know that the constant
exposure to your friends carefully
curated positive portrayals of their
life and leave you to feel inadequate
and can increase rates of depression
and something I think we’re gonna be
hearing more about in the near future I
said there’s a fundamental mismatch
between the way our brains are wired and
this behavior of exposing yourself to
stimuli with intermittent rewards
throughout all of your waking hours so
it’s one thing to spend a couple hours
at the slot machine in Las Vegas but if
you bring the slot machine with you and
you pull that handle all day long from
when you wake up that when you go to bed
we’re not wired from it it’s short
circuits to brain we’re starting to find
that it has actual cognitive
consequences one of them being the sort
of pervasive background hum of anxiety
here’s the thing the world we live in
isn’t real social media isn’t real and
by design social media rewards us for
showing our best life the edited posed
champagne Michelin star holiday
orchestrated best angle of our life the
highlight reel but you don’t ever see
real life the 99% of our lives the
behind the scenes that unglamorous
unfiltered day-to-day bland normality
and you end up comparing your
behind-the-scenes to other people’s fake
highlight reel and using others as a
mirror
benchmark for how you should look how
successful you should be or how you
should live these fake comparisons will
only serve to make you feel inadequate
and inferior to something that isn’t
even real research continually shows
that comparing your life to someone
else’s creates envy low self confidence
low self-esteem and depression you
compare yourself to other people every
single day consciously or subconsciously
and no matter what I say you’re not
going to stop because comparing one
thing to another is a natural human
thing to do whether we want to admit it
or not a big reason why anything has
value is because there’s something worse
all better to compare it to think about
it an old brick of a mobile phone with a
big aerial is only considered amazing in
a world before the smartphone
the horse and carriage is only
considered a phenomenal mode of
transport until the car comes along the
answer isn’t to stop making comparisons
because unfortunately we can’t control
that but you have to change the object
of your comparison from someone else to
yourself you have to measure yourself
against yourself and by doing this you
start a base point where you consider
yourself to be perfectly fine exactly
how you are but it also is the most
effective motivating and healthy way to
work to improve yourself you’ll become
you’ll happy yourself when you stop
putting pressure on yourself to be more
like someone else and when you start
comparing real to real we are in a
really bad state of affairs right now in
my opinion it is it is eroding the core
foundations of how people behave by and
between each other and I don’t have a
good solution you know my solution is I
just don’t use these tools anymore I
have it for years it’s created huge
tension with my friends huge tensions in
my social circles if you look at like
you know my facebook fee if I probably
haven’t I posted maybe two times in
seven years three times five times thing
just it’s less than 10
[Music]
and it’s weird I guess I kind of just
innately didn’t want to get programmed
and so I just turned tuned it out but I
didn’t confront it and now to see what’s
happening it’s really it really it
really bums me up back in the 1970s in
the early 80s at Xerox PARC when Steve
Jobs first went over and saw the
graphical user interface the way people
talked about influence the world was a
bicycle for our minds that here we are
you take you take a human being and they
have a certain set of capacities and
capabilities and then you give them a
bicycle and they can go to all these new
distances they’re empowered to go to
these brand new places and to do these
new things to have these new capacities
and that’s always been the philosophy of
people who make technologies how do we
create bicycles for our minds to do and
empower us to feel and access more now
when the first iPhone was introduced it
was also the philosophy Bank of these
technology how do we empower people to
do something more and what and in those
days it wasn’t manipulative because
there was no competition for attention
Photoshop wasn’t trying to maximize how
much attention it took from you it
didn’t measure success that way and the
Internet overall had been in the very
beginning not designed to maximize
attention it was just a putting things
out there putting things out there
creating these message boards it wasn’t
designed with this whole persuasive
psychology that it burns later if you
feed the Beast that beast will destroy
you if you push back on it we have a
chance to control it rein it in and it
is a point in time where people need to
hard break from some of these tools and
the things that you rely on the short
term dopamine driven feedback loops that
we have created are destroying how
society works no civil discourse no
cooperation misinformation miss truth
and it’s not an American problem this is
not about Russian ads this is a global
problem
mr. Zuckerberg would you be comfortable
sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night
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