Welcome to another episode of The Modern Moron! I have a very, VERY special guest lined up for you in this edition. Someone I’ve known my entire life, we’ve been through a lot together. My guest is… me. Sorry, I couldn’t get someone lined up for this week. Whatever. Don’t judge me.
Okay, we’re going to start off light and breezy and work towards dead serious. In my return to this podcast, not that anyone noticed I left… a few of you did though and thank you… but I would really rather not discuss politics anymore. Unfortunately that has become extremely difficult, so rather than treat politics as taboo, I’m going to try… TRY to just be curious about it. I got into a huge argument with the Senator over this… the Senator being my most regular guest on this program. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying friendships have been lost and certainly changed over the political climate both in this country and globally.
We’ve lost the ability to listen to an opinion other than our own, process it and come to an informed state of mind that is not completely RED or completely BLUE or BLACK or WHITE or RAINBOW. It doesn’t have to be all one color. Please see an article I will post at the end of the description from the L.A. Times titled “The Decline and Fall of Nuance”. Sadly, some of you may not do so simply because the L.A. Times represents something that has ZERO value to you. All information should have some value. Take all the information… turn it into knowledge… and then maybe we can apply it in the world with some wisdom and compassion. See what I did there? I’m so fucking Zen I can’t believe it.
By the way in that article, the author recalls seeing a woman at a Black Lives Matter protest with a sign that read, “Not all blacks are criminals. Not all whites are racists. Not all cops are bad. Ignorance comes in all colors.” How great would it be if we had a march or a sit-in with that as the central message.
Documentary recommendation… : The Biggest little farm on Hulu. The husband is a wildlife camera operator…. The wife is a personal chef, with a focus on healthy wholesome food. The husband, I believe was covering a property owner who had literally hundreds of animals, mainly cats and dogs, she was sheltering on her property. It was a public health issue and they had to gather all of these animals that were in some horrible living conditions.
The couple adopted one of the dogs from this situation. They truly rescued it. While they were at work the dog barked constantly to the point they got evicted. So they went for their dream of having a farm so they could keep the dog, whose life they had saved.
Very interesting how becoming farmers doesn’t always mean growing and nurturing all life. They have chickens. The chickens lay eggs. The eggs provide one of their main sources of income… until the coyotes start slaughtering the chickens. They tried everything to deter the coyotes until they had killed literally hundreds of chickens. Tried everything except shooting the coyotes.
So finally the farmer felt like he was left with no choice. He grabbed the shotgun and killed one of the coyotes. Cross fade from the image of the dead coyote to the image of the dog whom they rescued from being killed… his name was Ross. And it was a great poignant moment where they guy admitted there was some hypocrisy involved. He had raised some baby pigs, became attached to them and then had to sell them off to market. He had to put down sheep in the pasture that had become so injured that nothing could be done other than to kill the poor animal.
You may say, eat a plant based diet and there won’t be that problem. Well there were plenty of problems with other critters, specifically insects and snails specifically that were destroying their crops.
We have become sooooo unbelievably spoiled when we walk into our grocery stores and can pick up a styrofoam package with any kind of meat or seafood we want practically. And we take it for granted, at least I do. We loose perspective, at least i do. Multiple times a day, I lose perspective and get pissed or disgusted that my problems are not going away immediately, forgetting that the quality of my problems are luxuries compared to a vast number of people.
My first colonoscopy - Human jet ski and the water coming out of my ass was astounding. Despite the discomfort of drinking a gallon of that swill there was something good about being cleaned out from head to ass. I literally had nothing in me. Starting fresh… what was going to be the first thing I put in my body after it being completely clean as a whistle.
I know this is gross to some, but it shouldn’t be gross to this demographic. Even to my gals out there who listen and at one point in your life you were like, “ew, this guy’s gross with all the diarrhea talk and colonoscopy-isms. But when you hit our demographic? Sorry for the pun, but “shit gets real”.
What was I talking about?
My colonoscopy prep and that wonderful experience, that’s what I was talking about. If they’re going to send you a gallon of that stuff to drink knowing that your going to become a human water turbine, they might as well send some jumper cables as well so we can generate some electricity from all that naturally created water pressure.
Another reason why we can talk about this - I can talk about this to you, is because it’s just you and me right now, right? Probably anyway… if you are one of the rare few, let’s use the word privileged. It’s just you and me… no audience is listening to this in a group. Just me and you… nothing to be embarrassed or uncomfortable about, right?
Once I was in and wearing a fabulous gown that doesn’t tie in the back because they don’t want you to tie it in the back, I got my sedagive, and I was out like a light, didn’t wake up until the recovery room/ group patient farting chamber and I was done. The prep was the worst part.
Next Item...
DOCUMENTARY ASSIGNMENT - “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix
I haven’t been this adamant about a documentary you need to watch since ‘The Great Hack’ and if you still haven’t watched that documentary about what happened during the 2016 election, sorry to say this but shame on you. Do you want it to happen again? Do you enjoy burying your head in the sand? Strike that… burying your head in the sand does have it’s appeal in the short term. You have got to watch the Great Hack on Netflix and when you’re finished with that as uncomfortable and inconvenient as it may be, you absolutely have to watch The Social Dilemma. Don’t watch both in the same day though, that would overload your circuits.
For now, here are some of the people interviewed at length for this documentary:
First up is Tristan Harris
Wikipedia Page Biography - raised in the San Francisco Bay Area by a single mother. Later on, he studied computer science at Stanford University while interning at Apple Inc., then embarked on a master's degree at Stanford, where he joined a company called Persuasive Technology Lab. Harris studied the psychology of behavior change. Tristan was classmates with one of Instagram’s founders, Kevin Systrom, and helped create a demo app with the other founder, Mike Krieger.
In 2007, Harris dropped out of the master's program at Stanford. He launched a startup called Apture, which was focused on bringing instantaneous search to content on the web. Google acquired Harris’ company Apture in 2011 and he ended up working on Google Inbox.
His Opinions on technology use - While working at Google in 2013, Harris sent around a presentation to a handful of coworkers which was titled “A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users’ Attention”. In that presentation, Harris suggested that Google, Apple and Facebook should “feel an enormous responsibility” to make sure humanity doesn't spend its days buried in a smartphone. The 141-slide deck was eventually viewed by tens of thousands of Google employees and sparked conversations about the company's responsibilities long after he left the company. IN his presentation he discussed five human vulnerabilities:
Bad forecasting - The first vulnerability highlighted by Harris was ″bad forecasting,” where alert messages don’t clearly explain what the user is about to give up in terms of their attention.
For instance, Facebook might show a notification that you were tagged in a photo. While this alert might suggest you’d quickly “see a photo,” you’re probably going to actually spend 10 minutes on Facebook.
“Intermittent variable rewards” - This is the idea that users keep performing an action in hopes of getting a possible but unlikely reward. Harris called this type of behavior the “most addictive and hardest to stop,” just like playing slot machines in casinos.
His example: constantly refreshing an app like Twitter or Facebook to see new content from friends. “We spend lots of time -- are we getting the same value back?” he asks, before suggesting that Silicon Valley should design “to minimize the presence of intermittent variable rewards and reduce addictions.”
“Loss-aversion” or the “fear of missing out” or FOMO as the kids call it.Because we’re constantly afraid of missing an alert -- like a major event (and what are we calling a major event these days? When was the last time a Kardashian wiped their ass? -- we are continuously checking our phones as if running on a treadmill, Harris said. He suggested designers should “design to give users confidence that they can disconnect more often and not miss something important.”
Fast and slow thinking - Harris suggested that creating tech that’s too frictionless takes away our human ability to “consider before acting.”
Our phones buzz, so we take them out of our pockets without even thinking about it, for example. Harris suggested designers should “leave enough friction for users to pause and consider” their actions.
Stress and altered States - Here, Harris warned that certain actions we take with tech products force us out of a healthy state of mind.
For instance, Harris said, we stop breathing while we check our email and that our sympathetic nervous system is activated, our liver dumps glucose and cholesterol into our blood and our heart rates increase “preparing us for a fight or flight response.” He said designers should instead design apps to minimize stress and calm people.
Yes, designers should. The companies they work for should. But that’s not why companies are in business. When does the ethical behavior of a company become more important that profits? OR as most companies would say although maybe off the record, when should the consumer take responsibility for what they buy? You would probably get a different answer from different companies. Whole foods might give you a different “off the record” answer than say, Monsanto or Exxon/Mobile. Should there be any regulation to protect us Morons from ourselves or is it Mike Brady again with the Caveat Emptor. Remember I hauled that one out in Episode 38! Titled: “Facebook & Free Speech, I'm with Mark Zuckerberg, Caveat Emptor & The Brady Bunch, Pixar's Wall-E & Costco Chickens. How about that? We were talking about Facebook again.
Wasn’t that a fun trip down memory lane? Okay, I wanna wrap this up because there is so much more to talk about relating to this documentary. I will end with this clip from Tristan Harris where he talks about computers and the software or apps that we use and how they were tools. He compares that tool like any carpenter’s tool and how the apps we use today are very different types of tools…
MANIPULATION BASED ENVIRONMENTS - that’s what most of our social networking apps are on our smartphones that we have with us 24/7. And I’m sure you realize all your favorite flavors of News are all on social media as well, vying for your eyeballs.
Once again that was Tristan Harris who is a design ethicist with a non-profit organization he founded called “Time Well Spent”. The documentary is called “The Social Dilemma”, it’s on Netflix and it is a must watch. Think of it like taxes or picking up your dog’s poop when you take them for a walk. It’s gross but you gotta do it. We’ll definitely talk more about this. Until next time…
Sources:
Op-Ed: America has a terrible case of the screaming memes - Los Angeles Times (mediabiasfactcheck.com: Left-Center Biased based on editorial positions that favor the left and High for factual reporting due to a clean fact check record)
Google’s new focus on well-being started five years ago with this presentation - The Verge (Techpublication skewed left-center as opposed to far left)
Google employee warned in 2013 about five psychological vulnerabilities that could be used to hook users - MSNBC (moderately to strongly biased liberal. MIXED on factual reporting)
"The Social Dilemma:" Lies Spread 6x Faster Than Truth on Social Media | Amanpour and Company - PBS | Amanpour and Company | YouTube
