We really need to talk about this

Hi guys, it's me again and today I thought we'd talk a little bit about misinformation on the internet. I thought that oh I don't know now would be a good time. So in the past 2 or 3 years I don't know about you guys but I have seen such a massive dramatic 10x multiplier amount of videos on the internet that are either totally [ __ ] fake, misleading or anything else in between. Sometimes even both. And I know I hear people sometimes say, "Oh, well, I don't see as many AI videos anymore." Yeah, I wonder why. And so anyway, I think this is what's happened is that there is so much misinformation. There is so many people trying to mislead you, trying to cause you to think something that isn't true, trying to manufacture a false consensus. It's like the dead internet theory is almost reassuring because at least that means that nobody else would be harmed. But the reality is that there are a lot of people on the internet that are being led off a [ __ ] cliff by an AI video that didn't even exist. And so what I think the really like the point where I think the biggest flash point for this for me has been the recent conflict in Iran is that everybody is making up [ __ ] about this. It's like I'll watch a video and I'll be like, "Oh, what's going on here? Is this happening?" Nope. It was in 2021. Oh, is this happening? Nope. That was in Ukraine. Oh, is this happening? Nope, that's actually not even [ __ ] real. And then, oh, as a bonus, is this happening? It's actually Arma 3, the video game. And so, what I think has happened is that you've had so many of these different types of manipulations. And why are they happening? Why do we have all these manipulations? Well, it's very simple. Behavior follows incentives. How many of these manipulations are not being paid? The overwhelming majority of them are being paid for this. So, they're making money off of misleading people. And big surprise, you're upset that they're misleading people. Of course, they are. They are following an incentive. And I think that that incentive is the strongest on Twitter. I know that they're trying to fix this, but unfortunately, to the extent that you have basically a like this is what I think Twitter should do because I think that AI and fake information on Twitter is the absolute worst. I think it is the worst platform for fake information. And uh just because again it's text message image and you can effectively turn off replies. There's a lot of ways that you can do it and like have people not really notice whether you're lying to them or not. What they need to do is they need to change it into something like the YouTube partnerships program where you don't automatically default somebody a payment option. You don't automatically default somebody a revenue plan. they have to earn that and then have that given to them by going through a series of checks and rigor because whenever you don't have that well you have uh you know the 900th different uh anti-Israel or anti-Iran account that's posting images of either Ukraine or Israel getting bombed saying it's either Iran or Israel or the opposite. Right? And so basically that's what I think is really happening is that people are responding to incentives. They're seeing that basically making and pushing out fake information is something that has almost zero consequences. And I think that this is also like you've got to hold yourselves accountable for this. And by yourselves, I'm talking about myself as well. Uh is that really when we find out that somebody's posting something that's [ __ ] instead of asking them to correct themselves, we just move past it. And I think it's one of the it's one of the unfortunate realities of the extremely fast 24-hour news cycle that we live in nowadays is that, you know, even things like, for example, do you remember when Obama kind of like said that there might be aliens on a podcast and like this is a huge big deal? Yeah, that was last month. That might have might as well have just not happened. Uh let's think about the time that uh you know, Trump obviously released the Epstein files. How many people are talking about the Epstein files now? Substantially less than what they were. And you can check this all by Google Trends if you're unsure about any of this. And so what I think has happened is that the news cycles are so fast nowadays that there's never any room for not only is there no room for corrections, but there's also no room even for accountability. And what's really happened is that people instead of questioning what they're seeing, they just move on to the next thing. And so there's never any accountability whenever a news source gets something wrong, whenever they say something that's inaccurate. There's never an evaluation as to whether, you know, was this done on purpose? Was it done out of just a mistake? Was it done out of haste? Why did this happen? And it's never discussed at all. And I think this is a huge problem. And the reason why is because if you have people that are again, past performance is an indicator of future performance. Guess what? If somebody's is regularly posting [ __ ] guess what they're going to post after that? Probably more [ __ ] So what happens is that people are listening to this. they're paying attention to it and then they see, oh my god, it's another piece of [ __ ] It's another thing that's not even true. And people never be able they're never able to connect the dots here. And so, not only does the audience not hold them accountable, people don't really care. And this is another big issue. I've talked about this before. I don't want to get into it too much, but critical thinking is dead. Critical thinking is dead and we have killed it. And the way that we have killed it is with dogmatic ideological like thinking that effectively behaves like a religion. People have replaced uh you know I don't know Christianity or Islam with uh you know the Democrats or the Republicans with gender ideology with any form of you know like political dogma. And so now people don't want to go against that political dogma. I think that human beings have a a core desire. Like imagine imagine the human mind is like a car and the car can drive 200 [ __ ] miles an hour. It can go super super super super fast, but the brake system sucks. And I think that's what's happened with the human mind is that our ability to critically think, to perceive our realities, to be able to understand the world around us has vastly outpaced, multiple times outpaced our ability to cope with it, to cope with those conclusions, to ask yourself, well, what does happen after you die? Well, what does happen if you do this or that? Well, what is really the right and the fair thing to do? And people are afraid of these questions because they're afraid of the answers. And what they do instead of that is they look for an ideology that's going to answer all of those questions for them so they never have to think about it again. And that's what's happened with critical thinking. Before people used to outsource it to religion. Now they outsource it to politics, religion, or political dogma. And so what's happened is that you've had a massive entire ecosystem and culture of people that are terrified of saying the wrong thing. They're terrified of having the wrong opinion. They're terrified against going against the oftentimes manufactured consensus. And what happens is that you look at somebody like JK Rowling for example or even Elon Musk for another example or anybody else who's seen as a uh you know like I guess people would get mad. I don't want to name off a bunch of other content creators just I don't want to start drama, but we all know content creators that, you know, somebody said one thing that was wrong. They said one thing that was off color and or they didn't have the right opinion about the right topic in the right way at the right time. And for some reason now they're a [ __ ] Nazi. Well, guess what? Somebody's not a Nazi because they're not seeing your point of view. But unfortunately on the internet, that's the way it works now. And so what's happened is that we've created a culture of fear, a culture of repressed critical thinking because nobody wants to think for themselves. And how does this relate to misinformation? Let me explain the reason how this relates to misinformation. Like I hope that I've unders I've explained and you understand why critical thinking is dead. critical thing he is dead is because people are afraid of the conclusions and they don't want to come out against the consensus because if they do they might get ostracized from their group and then nobody will like them and then you can never wash that stain off because people do not believe in forgiveness. They don't believe in apologies. They don't believe in understanding. The hater economy on the internet is going stronger than ever. The Dow is at 50,000. The hater economy is at 50 million. So, the fact is that people are terrified of having the wrong opinion and critical thinking can sometimes lead you to the wrong opinion. Trust the science. Okay. Well, I heard the science is two genders. Oh, wait a minute. That's not the right type of science. And so, anyway, this happens quite often. So, we'll go back over and we'll talk about misinformation. Does anybody actually want to correct the misinformation about something that everybody that's quote on their side is eating up like a bunch of [ __ ] candy? No. Absolutely not. Nobody wants to go and correct the information that shows Israel getting bombed 500 times and tell them actually this is from Independence Day or well this is from a video game or something else or this is from 2019 and or or Iran or anything else and or like oh this this sup oh the new supreme leader of the day has now been killed again. Well I hear this every single day. The guy gets killed every day. It's the same guy right? I mean must pretty much suck. It's the worst worst version of Groundhog Day that I could imagine. Wake up every day, you're the supreme leader of Iran, and then you die, and then it happens again the day after. Sounds pretty [ __ ] bad, but according to Twitter, that's the world that we're in. So what I think has happened is that you've had so much misinformation, the information cycle, and this is one of the real pieces of I think genius that uh George Orwell had with uh what is it 1984 is that it was not necessarily that the news was all a lie. It was that there was so much misinformation and so much information in general that the deluge of it was so overwhelming that the mind of a person could not even comprehend the complexities, the amount of just pure volume of it and everything. And because of that, it is effectively the sheer size of it has lulled people into a sense of effectively powerlessness. They can't overcome this. they can't like reason it out. They can't understand it. And so they just simply opt to not understand and to just listen to what they're told. And I think again this is out of I said before uh fear, but it's also out of apathy and a lack of control. So what's happened is that people are now accepting of misinformation. They don't want to correct misinformation because people as soon as somebody makes up their mind on something. Well, they don't want to change their mind because changing your mind implies that you were wrong. Why would you ever want to admit that you were wrong? And I understand that. Oh, that's not the way you should think about it. That's nice. That's nice. Go back to Reddit. So, if you go over to the real world, uh, no, people don't like changing their opinion. There's a reason why the concept of anchoring exists, especially with sales, but also you're selling an idea. So, keep in mind that's the way people think of things. And so, once you can create that first impression with a with misinformation, you can then use that first impression to create even a secondary, well, that was fake, but you know, this secondary thing is also still kind of true. And I think this is what happens. And it begins a self-radicalization spiral. And you see this happen with certain creators where as soon as they start engaging with other forms of vitriolic, conspiratorial or problematic content, they alienate the audience that was more, I don't know, normal. And instead of that, they replace them with the people that are crazy. And as that happens, guess what? Crazy people want crazy [ __ ] Who would have guessed? And so then you now have to continue upping the ante. This happens with IRL streamers a lot, like nuisance streamers. The conclusion of every nuisance streamer is jail. That's the way it is. That's how it is. Every single one of them, if you just let it progress naturally, they will end up in jail because you start being annoying and then you be really annoying, then you're confrontational, then you're violent, then you're really violent, then you're in jail because you always have to keep upping the ante in order to maintain the attention of the audience. And I think that's what happened with a lot of different creators and it's what will continue to happen as well because it's basic human psychology. And I think that there are a lot of people out there who try to subvert this. They try to uh say that, oh well, we need to be better. We need to be better. Listen, we were doing crucifixions 2,000 years ago. In 2,000 years from now, we'll probably still be doing them. Maybe we'll bring it back. And so the point is that the human mind is not evolving as fast as you think it is. And at the same time, these basic human psycho psychological realities are not despawning. They're not going away. They're actually becoming more entrenched and actually more uh like basically more compromised. They're being uh played to. They're being taken advantage of at a much higher ratio because now you have these companies that realize, well, wait a minute. if we can just feed this [ __ ] an endless amount of information about the thing that makes him the most angry, he won't be able to stop using our app. And so now you have these people whose like blood pressure is being raised. It's like effectually these these companies are killing people because their blood pressure goes up 20 points the moment they open the [ __ ] app. And they're sitting there getting angry tapping out these little [ __ ] responses and they're arguing with either a Pakistani or a bot. Well, actually that's not true. Probably both. And so what's happened is that the amount of misinformation on the internet has just increased so much. Uh places like Twitter pay people for uploading it. Places on the internet like news websites if enough people report on it and start talking about it then news websites talk about it and sometimes they reinforce it and there's never any due diligence. And if there is, it's like two weeks after the fact. It's like this story has already completely made its way around the grow around the globe. And now uh you know, nobody's even talking about it. And uh yeah, they don't even think about the the the correction because the narrative has already been established and it's already moved past that original uh you know, fake fact. And so what's happened, I think, is that we've created a culture of misinformation. Now, the way that I think you stop this and how you deal with it is you have to look at incentives. Why do people push misinformation? They push misinformation. And again, I'm not talking about, you know, COVID or something like that. I'm talking about literal AI videos. I'm talking about videos that are posted as if they were today and it was 5 years ago. I have no problem with somebody posting a stupid opinion. But I do have a problem with people that are posting opinions and information that is deliberately misleading. And if those people are getting paid for it, then you can guarantee that you're going to have a lot more of it. Because I can also promise you that fake news will always be more exciting than real news because again, the sky's is the limit. Fiction is generally much more exciting than non-fiction. I've never heard of a single dragon in real life. And so what's happened is that you've had these things kind of evolve and grow out of control. And now there is an entire ecosystem of people that are consuming this fake information and they're being rewarded for it. They're being they're they're getting more of it. They're being paid for it. And then you have people that are building their careers around it. And how do you actually stop this from happening? Well, you have to stop giving them [ __ ] money. And I think that needs to be the point where you look at it. Now, Twitter has been trying their best to stop this and shut it down, but you know, we'll I'll give it a few weeks and we'll see what happens. Right now, it sure seems like it's a pretty big problem. But my in general opinion on this is that this problem will only continue to get worse. But there is a silver lining. And I will talk about the silver lining. The silver lining is the fact that if you're not a [ __ ] idiot, it is a lot easier to understand things and you have a tremendous advantage nowadays. And on top of that, everybody in the world is developing a general distrust of believing what they see. And I don't know if you've noticed this before, but every single image, even if it's something like, you know, there's an image of uh I don't know, like uh Pearl Harbor, and you know, you'll see four comments. A rock, is this AI? Well, you know what? That's it's it's [ __ ] Yes, it's [ __ ] but it's it's it's an investigation. It's it's a it's a level of thinking. It's a level of questioning that I think for such a long time hasn't happened. And the silver lining of this age of misinformation is that it's also going to lead forward to an age of skepticism. It's going to lead forward to people reflexively just believing that, you know what, uh this might not even be true. And I think that's very long overdue because people for a very very long time had trusted the mainstream media. I think co really severed this. But before that and even now to an extent if they're saying the things that you agree with. Um people do trust the mainstream media. And I think the problem with trusting mainstream media is that they don't necessarily lie but they do misrepresent. and they misrepresent in a way that can effectively completely shift the the the uh the feeling, the intent, the uh goal or anything like that. They can shift it entirely. And I think that people would just accept that unquestioningly. And I think that one of the silver linings of the age of misinformation that we're entering into now is that that is calling into question everything. It's calling into question all information, all sources, all like different all all primary information, all videos, all images. And I think that now that we've also created other secondary sources for people being able to, you know, say, "Hey, this isn't true. Hey, this is not real." And being able to detect this, I do think that there will be a long-term positive effect, but it will take a lot longer than you might imagine. But hopefully the main thing that I really hope for is that they're able to get rid of the pain the people getting paid for this stuff, right? I don't have a problem. I don't want to have people get banned, right? I don't want people to get banned. But if you're posting fake information and AI videos and stuff like that and you're presenting it as if it's real, well then you've got a pretty big problem. And I think that it's pretty obvious to see how this is an issue. So again, I don't want to see anybody get banned. I don't want to see anybody get censored, but I don't want to see those [ __ ] get paid either. I think that's a big problem. And the more that you have these people getting paid, the more this issue will continue to grow. I wanted to talk about this because I think it's going to keep getting worse. But at a certain point, I think we are very close to the climax. And after that, I could see things beginning to improve, get better, and for the, you know, global internet uh awareness or the consciousness to have a much larger degree of skepticism even with things that they believe. And that's what I hope for. And that in my opinion is the best thing that could come out of misinformation. But god damn is it a painful road. So anyway, I wanted to talk about this with you guys today. Thank you all very much for watching. I appreciate it. And let me know what you think in the comments. And I'll see you tomorrow. Peace.