Jordan Harbinger

Now, back to Jacob Ward.

In the book, there's an experiment where the kids get different colored T-shirts and they quickly favor their own tribe based on the color of T-shirt.

What's the role of the platform here?

Is the algorithm creating the tribe or is it helping people find their existing tribe faster?

It just seems like that's where the natural attraction is for companies that want to make money, is just appeal to our most base instinct.

I want to jump ahead a little bit.

Explain guidance systems, these sort of hidden rails that, I guess, make us feel free while basically only narrowing our options.

Yeah, before it even prints because you can't change anything.

Yeah, this is a little bit tangential as well, but you've seen those articles, I assume, and I've covered this on the show, Kashmir Hill writes about this stuff for the Times.

I'm not talking about mentally ill people who kill someone based on an AI chatbot.

They're mentally ill.

There are people that are fully not mentally ill that will think, I have come up with a new form of mathematics.

Oh, yeah.

I get a lot of mail from these people.

I bet you do.

Yeah.

The scary part is they're not crazy.

They've just been deluded in all of their shortcut buttons have been flipped and switched and they've been immersed in this for a long time and they've almost become mentally ill because they're suffering from a delusion.

But there's almost nothing you can diagnose and there's no prescription other than go outside and touch some grass, pal, because you are talking to a chat bot that's fluffing you up and you're drinking the Kool-Aid.

That's very problematic, right?