Aza Raskin

No matter where you start, YouTube always seemed to want to send you somewhere a little bit more crazy.

What Guillaume was seeing was algorithmic extremism.

When I saw that, I thought, okay, this is clearly wrong.

Guillaume could see how these cross-currents would pull viewers in countless delusional directions.

He knew the algorithm had to change, and he was confident he could change it.

You'd hope this would mark the beginning of a humane design movement at YouTube's headquarters.

So what happened?

But each time it was the same response from the management.

You know, this example is obviously very familiar to listeners of this podcast.

And Randy, you've seen this pattern play out over your whole career.

So what does it actually look like to think in systems at the center?

And why is it so hard?

What you're saying is that it's easy to optimize for time on site, retention, number of daily active users.

It's hard to know what even to measure to understand whether someone is thriving or getting mentally stronger over time.

So you sort of know that you're doing something wrong when you just have a single number that lets you know whether you're doing a good job or not.

And you know you're doing it right when you're sort of looking at an ecosystem and treating things relationally, which is, of course, harder, but is necessary for us to reach a humane future.

Okay, so now let's move on to principle two.

Protect the systems we all depend on.

So what happens when you just over focus on one thing and you forget the rest is that you create, of course, a whole bunch of externalities, unintended but inevitable ways in which a new invention or product, which was intended to be helpful or at least not be harmful, ends up causing massive amounts of new problems that show up on society's balance sheet.

So I'm very familiar with one of them because I invented the infinite scroll prior to social media.