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Chapter 1: What are the implications of social media addiction trials for big tech?
The verdict is in that landmark social media addiction trial Meta and YouTube found liable for a product that harms the very children who use it. Big tech, your gig is over. They do it by design. They're trying to keep us all scrolling. It's bad for us. It's really bad for kids.
I'll tell you this, if the jury had returned to no, the champagne corks would be popping in the boardrooms of Google and Meta. And for parents, we now know that they were manipulating our children for profits. Every kid with a cell phone, with any device, with a camera and connection to the internet is in danger.
This is What Now? with Trevor Noah.
you
How do I pronounce your name, by the way?
Dex and then Hunter Torek.
Oh, Torek. Okay. So the E, no, it's not a... Yeah, yeah. Okay. Where's the last name from?
Scottish. Weirdly enough. Scottish? Yeah. So my dad's side of the family went to India in like the 19th century. They were Scottish and they were part of the East India Company. So they were like the working class Scots who made up like a huge part of the East India Company. And then that's how the British Empire went and conquered places. Okay.
So I think they were like merchants or like soldiers. It's such a hazy bit of history. And then there was, of course, just this one like very elderly aunt, you know, in her 90s who like told me like the family history. She was the only person who'd like mapped this thing out. Yeah.
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Chapter 2: How did Dex Hunter-Torricke get involved in Silicon Valley?
But let's talk about your story in this. I remember the first time your name came up in my world. I was reading something about the tech industry. And I've always been fascinated by... how the tech industry has evolved. I've met many people involved in tech, founders of some of the biggest companies, founders of startups still trying to get their thing going.
And there's one thing I'll say, for the most part, every single one of them seemed to have, in Silicon Valley in particular, an idealistic view of the world. and how they planned to make it a better place. They were like, I've got this app and it's going to make accommodation better for everybody. And I've got this app and it's going to make getting a car easy for everybody.
And I've got this app and it's going to make restaurant deliveries easier. And I've got this app and it's going to improve how people connect with loved ones. And I've got this app and it's going to... And everyone came in with this wide-eyed optimism mindset. But I'd love to know how you started in this world. What was your original journey? How did you get into Silicon Valley?
And then we'll get to the world of you knowing Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and all of these people. But let's start at the beginning. How did you get into Silicon Valley?
I was obsessed with changing the world from a very early age. I was a very weird kid. And part of it was just I was growing up in the UK in the 80s and 90s. And my dad was the... He was a person who was a refugee as a kid. He was four years old when he was a refugee during the Second World War.
He'd grown up in a refugee camp in India, and he'd come to the UK in the late 50s, total outsider, probably a few pounds in his pocket. Society was deeply racist. And his life was just terrible. I didn't learn about it until many years later, actually, near the end of his life, when I was 30 years old and I was working in Silicon Valley at that point.
My mom, she was an immigrant from Malaysia, came to the UK in the 70s to be a nurse in Britain's National Health Service. And growing up, we had absolutely nothing. There was no money.
I grew up mostly in the Southeast of England in this town, Tunbridge, and it was sufficiently provincial at the time that when me and my sister walked down the street, people would literally stop and stare because they'd never seen people who weren't white. Kids would come up to you on the playground, they'd say, can I feel your hair, mate?
I always remembered kids would ask, do you speak Chinese or Japanese? And I thought, I was born in Hammersmith. I mean, how likely is it that I speak Chinese or Japanese? But that was annoying enough for me that from this very early age, I was interested in why we even assign these ridiculous labels to people. And we make these assumptions and they constrain our whole lives.
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Chapter 3: What challenges did Dex face while working at the UN?
has a lot of that responsibility. They built these things. They're things which they had the closest understanding of as they emerged. But the failing is absolutely not exclusive. We also had a absolutely historic collapse in leadership from political leaders, from a bunch of other people who have immense power on the trajectory of those technologies and how our society should respond.
If tech hadn't had all the effects it's had in the world, if you didn't have social media and smartphones and AI and so on... I think it's probably quite likely that we'd still be facing huge crises at this point. A bunch of these things are unfolding. And of course, AI is a thing which I'm very focused on and is a big part of this.
But part of the reason what I'm doing now is in fact not just about tech really, is if AI vanished tomorrow, we would still have gargantuan problems. We would still be in really bad shape. It is the combination of the tech with a deeply broken world that adds up to the state of dysfunction we're in now.
Yeah, in many ways, I like to think of it the same way I think of like a nuclear weapon. Humans will always fight, but a nuclear bomb means the effects of that fight are going to be so much greater than they would have been otherwise, right? I think the same goes for AI. I think the same goes for social media. People who work in these industries will often say, we aren't the cause of this.
People will always find a way to blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yes, yes, I agree with that. You're not wrong. However, the tool that you've provided the people with has given them an outsized ability to inflict damage or harm on society. And so I want to go back to your early days.
So when you first got into the tech industry, let's use Facebook, because Facebook is really at the center of many of these conversations right now. So what were you doing at Facebook?
I was a speechwriter. So I was the company's first speechwriter. The company was just about to go public. It needs to communicate a lot more. And folks like Zuckerberg, a lot of the other senior leaders, they had to talk to everyone from Wall Street to Publix, media. You were constantly doing events and engaging with other leaders. moving the entire company.
This is an organization that grew enormously in the time I was there from a couple of thousand people to tens of thousands in just the space of a few years. And all along, I was there to help figure out how do you manage the telling of that story at scale? Oh, wow. And that's something which, of course, in order to tell that story well, you have to be able to get under the hood.
of any number of these deeply consequential issues, all the things that are really controversial, the things that are really significant. You have to deeply understand the executives and those voices as well. I was a speechwriter for a lot of my early career, and people often think the voice of people is about the combination of words, and that's the easy part.
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Chapter 4: How does Dex view the role of tech companies in shaping society?
You know, that's not really a thing for us right now. And so actually, I'm not saying that suddenly Zuckerberg had to make the refugee crisis his number one thing. I absolutely think if you have a thesis about you're connecting the world and you're building this motor of society and you happen to be one of the world's richest people, you probably should make it a part of your responsibility.
But there's any number of other issues which absolutely are things where the company dropped the ball on. Why is it our societies are so deeply divided and angry now in a world awash with disinformation and hate? That is something which absolutely wasn't the company's power, and it touched the lives of refugees and non-refugees alike. It shapes all of our lives.
It shapes the entire digital ecosystem, and the company did not meet its obligations there.
When I read, you know, when I read this book and when I've read different accounts of people who've worked in Facebook and then to a lesser degree Twitter at the time, they'll talk about how they got frustrated at seeing which scales the company would put its thumb on, right? Tech companies generally will tell us, the general public, that they are not... shaping anything.
They will say, we're a platform, we're a message board. It's part of the reason they don't have the same obligations that a TV station does. So if somebody tells a lie or an egregious lie on CBS or NBC or one of those, they get held accountable. Facebook, Twitter, all of them go like, no, no, no, no, no. We say nothing.
All we do is provide a message board and the people say things, but we do not participate in what is being said or not being said. All right. When you read accounts from people who've worked in these organizations, it seems like that couldn't be further from the truth.
Yeah, that's absurd. Look at how much the algorithm on X shifted once Twitter became X under Elon, right? You'd spend five seconds in there, it's just a complete cesspool of the absolute worst people who've been algorithmically boosted now to dominate your feeds. Absolutely. There are choices made every day in the architecture of these platforms and the content they're surfacing.
One of the things that occurred during the first Trump administration onwards was Facebook started experimenting with reducing the volume of news and political content in some feeds because they discovered that people were getting to the point where they were so exhausted from the amount of political content that they said, oh, you know what? This is bad for engagement.
Let's just get rid of the news. And that's the thing where, hey, maybe that actually gave people some better experience in their life. Maybe they spent more time. That would be how Facebook would define a better experience. But in fact, if your society's in flames, wouldn't it be more responsible to actually share these things?
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Chapter 5: What was the impact of the refugee crisis on Dex's perspective?
What happens when AI turbocharged industries consume wildly more resources and they destabilize already reeling ecosystems, which we know are hanging by a thread and which will impact the lives of millions, if not billions of people? Between 2018 and 2023, the world consumed almost as much resources as one third of the 20th century. And it's accelerating all the time.
And these are things where in fact, you know, big tech companies, they go to government who are desperate for economic growth now, right? A lot of the advanced economies in the global north, they've got plateauing growth, they've got declining living standards. They go to them and say, build this wonder technology, build this infrastructure. We will give you back the keys to a good future."
And of course, that's not happening. This is something which on the present path promises to enrich a tiny sliver of societies, mostly in the United States, mostly in China. And I think the world we're going to end up in, in the next 10, 15 years is going to be much more unstable than today, with rapidly declining living standards for hundreds of millions of people.
I think a lot of graduates will not be able to get good jobs at all. People who did a whole bunch of things in their lives and were told if they did these things right, they would get a good life and their kids would have better lives than them. That is not going to happen at all on the path we're on. Is the tech industry going to solve these things? No.
And in fact, they have tried to minimize debate about these things. They've tried to point people back towards the technical solutions. Now it is a moment in which societies and our leaders need to have a mainstream conversation about what the heck we're going to do to manage all of those effects. And that cannot be left up to the tech industry.
But now we're in a situation where, like you said earlier in the conversation, the world affected tech and now tech is affecting the world. In the lead up to some of the elections happening in the US, the tech giants have put together some of the most insane amounts for political campaigns. They're going after every single politician who is proposing any type of restraint or constraint on AI.
And whether we like it or not, money shapes a lot of an election. So you have the tech industry fighting to define how it should be managed or it should be governed. And the people who are going to govern it being funded by them, It seems like an infinite loop that's for the most part already lost, unless something big breaks, as we've seen in the past.
It's only when something big breaks that something changes dramatically.
I mean, I don't think we should be under any illusions. The most likely path we're on, the one we are on right now, leads to disaster for our societies and all societies globally. I actually don't think anyone gets out of this thing.
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