One: Wonderland
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Take a while now in with technical that you go and serve and on the enter near.

it's another day in the life of the jammers s maybe a family a little bit like yours, except it's not really just another day today's the day i'm taking my family surfing around the world on the internet school .

that finally install the internet on our home computer. Now I can serve them any time.

Test test.

The daylight I just saw.

the west Virginia welcome center.

wild, wonderful, less Virginia with jim justice.

The gover name is jim justice. I feel like the campaign signs like make themselves okay.

So just like tell me the story of tokyo on the .

way OK this are. So last year, you and I hop in a car.

you just time we have like.

can you just what are you up to today and what are you happen .

to find out to meet this guy? His story is is really interesting. So he says that he was radicalize through youtube videos and spent, you know, several years and becoming progressively more extreme in his politic.

After this shooting in new zealand last march, there was a lot of talk about online radicalization. The shooter was a White nationalist to clearly spend a lot of time in far right internet communities. I've been looking for a good case study of how IT happens to just one person, what that path looks like.

And I kept hearing over and over again from sources I was talking to in this world that you have to look at youtube. There are elements of IT that seem very familiar to me and some that that don't seem so familiar. So we didn't haven't walk us through IT mr.

turn. I was so excited to that this, that I was my turn. So we drove down the west Virginia, where he lives as going right, great, you stand in right there is on his headphones. Big smile.

Me, you guys.

i'm going to take a microphone around you.

That's why he's got a gorilla t shirt on. He says hi and brings us into his friend's house. Thank you for letting. And first thing he does is.

can you describe what IT .

is that you're setting down a lot.

Forty three.

Pola is gone the first time had a gun.

I've liked fireroom my whole life. I'm not against firearms. But yeah that's i've always been like that. I don't really need one.

But then then the day after I got death threats, went out, bought one, but I never have to use that. These guys usually just like sense what teams, your house and shit like that. But you know, it's just to be safe.

Where should we sit? Where's the best place for us to eventually we go over, we sit on the couch, you know, little test here, oh, testing one, two, three to me and he starts telling what begins, like a pretty reliable and familiar story. So can you just start like, tell us your name and how old you yeah.

my name's kale. K, i'm twenty six years old. Um I was born in florida, but I grew up here in Virginia.

When did you move to original?

My mother had me with some man that I never met, and then SHE, like, immediately left florida. I guess I don't know all the details there.

He had kind of a rough childhood as he describes.

IT got raised moment.

Grandparents didn't really have a lot of friends. What were you like as a kid?

Really shy and nerdy hicks on on the bus didn't .

really feel like you fit in.

Going to high school was hell. I hated IT.

I saw everybody y's conformance like a lot of teenagers.

He got really into video me. So I was a.

he discovered the freshman .

year of high school was whatever I got .

high speed internet, the internet.

I don't know what .

I would have done without the .

internet .

was like skate. And the internet is a revolution for him.

Because finally, that's when I started playing a lot of online video games in the house.

He finds people who are like him.

people all over the country.

all over the world.

I met a lot of friends .

up so quick.

and he developed this new routine where, like, every day he comes home from school, gets on his computer.

plays a bunch .

of video games, and then later at night.

i'd turn on youtube.

goes on youtube.

youtube. At the .

time I was be forever, mostly the videos and .

comedy sketches.

This was like early, early. Stay up all night.

night night.

And bossed up laughing if cab didn't feel .

like he fit in in high school in his sort of physical surroundings.

Categories are, but I like people.

Youtube was the place that he felt most at home.

I like them in short bursts.

You're speaking to be very deeply here. I experience ed this too like I was not cool in high school and I remember of the internet kind of being a place that you would go to like escape yeah and IT was IT was sort of nicer than your real life in some cases. You're right.

IT was nicer back then.

Are you political at the time?

political. And like a very surface level sense, right? Like anti authority. And like you know, most, my politics as a teenager came from like the canadians. And this is Michael. Mom, I am here to make a citizens, Michael, more documentary and that influence me. I mean, I wish that CNN in the other mainstream media, or just for once, to tell the truth about what's going on in this country, whether so there was very much set that punk rock influence inside of me.

He also got really into .

these new atheist videos, everything, everything I watching, like on youtube. I mean, to say that infects us. You most basic integrity, you'd get old uploads. For me, what matters is the truth. Like a Richard dockers speech, there is nothing special about the bike.

All I remember these videos, they felt like kind of scandalous at the time.

right? They felt super sive. They felt like watching people say the uncomfortable .

thing that he anted is morally with a book. Why give us a book that supports slavery .

by today's standard? Obviously, like this is extremely tame, but at the time, like this was pretty edging stuff. Been like early obama years.

right? Oba years.

You like obama, what? What did you feel about him?

I like them. I didn't know much about him because I didn't look into actual politics, so I didn't know what he was doing. But yeah, I liked him.

I thought, yeah, we have a black president. That's cool. Like, you know, first, black president making progress year. Graduated twenty eleven winter college.

and then he goes off to college and college. That just doesn't really take for him.

I wanted to go, and do you like an environmental major? And I didn't have a good time. Most of time. I'd stay in my room even on nice days when people out on the cloud throw on frisbees. I'd sit my room and play video games. And then there was also the embarrassing moment where I gotta a fight with this kid on campus and kind of got laughed of campus. And that night I freak on left because I wasn't going to class anyway, and I just withdrew from my classes and I laughed.

And I came back to west virgin. So he moved back into his grandparents and there, like he does have much to do. He doesn't have a job. He doesn't really have a direction.

just me in a room.

in a bed. He spent a lot of time, slept a lie, feeling depressed.

sit in my basement and just be like, so freaking down at one.

he loses his gaming computer.

My gaming computer got stolen, by the way, was really fucked and Jerry me up a wall. And so I didn't even have video games. Now I have a crappy little computer that can hardly run anything but .

IT can run youtube. And so now .

he's in his early twenty years. He's living his grandparents house. And he feels like at this time in his life, when he should be like finding his way, should be starting a career, thinking about having a family inside. He's just watching U.

T.

we.

And then the human brain is the network of approximate one hundred billion neons.

I found a document called god in the neurons. When we grow up, our moral and ethical compass is almost entirely forged by our environment. S, and like how you can fall into patterns of behavior. And since you have neuroplasticity, you can get out of his parents behavior.

When we are self aware, we can alter, misplace emotions because we can trull the cost.

So I got in this mindset of, oh, my brain is just like this tool that I can shape and to whatever I want, and then .

boles into this emerging wing of youtube.

And so I started just going through self help content.

self help help video.

What dream or vision do you want to turn into reality?

values. A easy stuff.

to be honest.

The process of conditioning ourselves actually .

feels incredible .

like tony .

Robinson and stuff .

every precious .

to they're like people with advice .

specifically for you continue to do those .

same behaviors that keep you for making the change.

guys like Caleb.

And then to be truly free, it's both very easy and very hard.

I found staff.

but we can only be kept in the cages we refuse to see. So stefan malu is this canadian libertarian, formerly a historian and treatment ur, and then he became like a good guy.

Body three of and radio.

I hope that to doing very well. Stuff just was in the side bar one day.

and I clicked on IT. You really have to open the often iron bound doors of your heart.

When youtube, so early in its life, removed its fifteen minute limit on how long videos could be, he just started pumping out our two hour long shows called freedom ain radio.

The approach that we take, that freedom ain radio sopo craic approach that we take can be very.

very helpful for you. Where he would expand on philosophical ideas.

Philosophy is the old discipline. IT covers everything. And that's why, to me, that is the most exciting and fundamental.

And I was telling you things that make him feel Better. You're saying this depression that you're going through, it's not permanent, things will get Better. And that a lot of the disillusionment and pain that Young men like caliver facing is is not actually their .

fault from the perspective of a Young man. To take a brief look at society .

is the fault of society.

I mean, you get to cross on demand pornography. You get video games that are unbelievable, realistic, absorbing and addictive. And what else do they have to look forward to? Well, they can get themselves involved in higher education and graduate an average of twenty five thousand dollars in debt to a job market is that is pretty and into declining. Seen real.

he finds a lot of what he's saying, pretty sensible .

students are have right to be depressed. Their society is unsustainable because nobody y's asking the fundamental questions about why the society is .

the way is why things are so bad. Yeah.

yeah, that's true. And he's not just talking at people. He invites people to send him questions.

I have had a number of requests to do a podcast on how to meet a nice girl, because there a lot of invites .

them into his life. He would talk about how he grew up. I was .

interested in reality from a very early age. I was physically, emotionally and mentally abused.

And he's talked about how he was so much Better.

Now I have consistently said, if you have problems with the appearance, talk to a therapy ist.

And he had went to therapy, and his life had improved.

Before we met, Christina had spent some, quite some time work on herself.

and they had a wife become on stream with him.

And he has his wife, fn this channel.

and they d talk about their life together.

I watching my daughter learn how to make jokes, finding out what is funny for her, what is not funny for her, and why I just, I want to a kiss her hair all day.

just because that you, I must kiss.

talks about how much he loves his daughter as like, I want all that stuff. I want a family like that because that's what I want in my whole life. I just wanted a stable family. I thought, well, if I just keep watching more and more, I .

i'll be like stuff.

Define menu his voice and his videos become a source of stability for him.

The very fix things that people need to do to be happy.

And b says that all the stuff that he's watching a youtube, it's actually helping started .

working a very clean.

he gets a new job.

And then I started like getting over a lot of my social anxiety because I enforced interactive people, and i'm also hanging out with all these high school kids.

He starts to feel like things are picking up for him.

Finally and after that, I mean, there was just more and more of that.

so.

I was pretty much always on youtube.

He's watching not only like the self home stuff from Stephen.

great. A I starts .

getting pretty into joe rogan. The biggest podcast, youtube talk show guy that there is on the internet.

Thank you very much. Cool fuck.

But back then was just starting to experiment with uploading his interviews .

to youtube and is with this, ladies and gentlemen.

He just keeps watching and watching.

much.

If I was any single moment that I had. I was White in youtube videos. This is a five, probably it's adapt, ten, twelve, thirteen.

fourteen hours a day, individuals, five people .

that sound like a crazy person, but that's what I would do.

And when Caleb talks about watching youtube videos during this period in his life, he talks about experiencing, this is the sensation of falling. But the thing that he doesn't even really know to think about is that on the other side of his screen, there's a force that's pulling him in. And that force has to do with a french guy named ed geo g, hello, this Kevin.

Hey, how are you doing? Well, how are you great? Who, even though theyve never met?

So I think everything .

is ready is a really important .

part of calm story.

I am Michael gold. I'm a political correspondents for the new year times. My job is to cover the race for president this year.

The times as life courage is so valuable because we have people on the ground who can give you information as they are experiencing IT, and we have a team of reporters and editors sifting through the days' information, giving you real time updates. In any given moment. You have a sense of what's happened that day, what's coming still, what IT all means.

It's so hard in a breaking new situation to sort out what you actually need to know at the times you that we're putting things in the context that helps what you're seeing in the moment. Make a sense you're getting fast information, but you know that it's reliable. When you subscribed to in your your times, you get access to all of our life coverage leading up to the election.

And on election night itself, you can subscribe at N Y time. Start calm flash. subscribe.

I did A P. H, D. Artificial intelligence, and then I worked at the microsoft geum.

Shallow is pretty smart guy. You studied how to make robots.

Essentially exactly.

Got is doctor studying machine learning. And then in two thousand and ten, he got his dream job working at google.

So when I joined google, I actually didn't know which project I would be put on.

And when he gets to google, he gets this really resting and exciting .

assignment needed someone on the A. I. Of youtube. I was perfect fit.

And the project he's assigned to work on is ultimately what distinguishes youtube from every other website on the internet. And that has to do with the recommendation side bar and the artificial intelligence that makes the whole thing work. And did this seem to you like a big deal to be given a job at google working on youtube recommendations?

Yeah, that was really amazing at first to realize that my work was going to be affecting so many people. So I thought, I thought it's going to be a good thing. I thought, okay, we can make artificial intelligence, make the world a bit a place.

And when you got there, I assume there was some algorithm that was selecting videos for people. How did that algorithm work?

yes. So initially, when europe be started, what's best was like clicks. Like the more people clicked a and videos, the Better than though he twice. And then they realized that IT LED to too many click bates.

So people would click on the title and realized that the video was not at all but what was stated in the title, and then they would leave the platform immediately. So that would be actually bad for youtube. So we switched their measure to total watch time.

And how was the goal of this algorithm explained to you? Like what did you understand about what youtubes executives wanted?

The idea was to maximize watch time at all cost, to just make you grow .

as big .

as possible. IT seems like a simple shift.

but that shift has radical .

sequence, these numbers that no one has ever seen before.

Youtube now pulls in more than a billion dollars a quarter. It's an incredible size of audience. We're consuming ever more video content. It's not so much if you're watching youtube, it's how much.

How are you feeling about your work at this point?

I think we were so excited, uh, and working in this project that we didn't really question too much that watch time was a good metric. We were thinking I am in. If people are watching longer, they might be appear about what they're watching. So at the time, I felt pretty good about this year.

I had a moment to stick .

your buzz in my ear any single moment .

that I wasn't talking to someone I was consuming kind, hey everybody, this have posts brought you by.

But then I realized there were some issues. People were noticing that you had a problem with maximizing just watch theme that IT creates these filter bubbles.

Same more about that.

The way I exchange when I was a youtube .

at the time was .

everybody when .

you watch a cat video, then the recommendation and can say, oh, you watch a cat video. So we are going to give you, and over cat video then.

and over cat video then.

and over cat video, more of the same, more of the same, more of the same. And at the time, I was really worried about wasting human potential if you could go on all of you too. But then the thing that going to keep you watching the most, these cats, is this the right thing to do to to give you, again, cats on cats on cats.

And over time, gym e realizes that this filter bubbles problem he's been noticing is actually worse than everyone just watching the same cat videos over and over.

So at the time, IT was a demonstration .

in Carol in caro.

egypt, erupted in the egypt caro.

these news videos, these political videos, like this conflict in egypt, that's going out at the time. And he sees that the algorithm is showing people in different groups the same thing over and over.

And you would see a video from the site of the protesters on. Then I will recommend another video from the site of protesters. So you would only see the site of protesters. You start with the side of the police. You would only see the side of the police.

Then you had only one side .

of reality. You couldn't see both sides. So these two different realities were created .

once you recognized that there were these filter bubbles. These are of algorithmic echo chAmbers. What did you do about IT?

So um the .

first thing I didn't want to do is complain about IT and try to find like the bad example that shows what's wrong with IT because I didn't want to be the group y french guy who complains. So what I did is side projects like I created, uh, with another engineer who still let youtube. We created an eugen ism that did the exact opposite it'd got out of the filter bubble.

And did any of these side projects have any impact? Youtube black, they move into testing where they implemented managers like them.

They were always just prototype, but then they were never even test on a real users.

And why do you think that is?

He means the way they were saying IT, is that okay? It's not our objective. And our objective was to increase watch time.

So the the problem of the political polarization of giving people only one side of of a story like you're noticing this problem while your youtube and IT sounds like you you are trying to address IT through these side projects, but you know your bosses are not um saying, gee, that's the best idea we've ever heard. Let's put IT alive on the site right now. Like how do things unfold for you at youtube from there?

Yes, when I propose the third project to my manager, he told me they where you, I wouldn't work and need too much. Then for a few months, I didn't work on IT. And then when I started working on IT again, then I got fired for bad performance review, which is true because then I spend so much time on this project that I spend less time on my main project.

So the left google actually left silicon value altogether and move back to france. And he says that he kind of stopped thinking about the youtube algorithm together. Until one day, like an old french romance, the two meet again.

I was in the best ride .

from Young to paris. So IT was six. I was working in paris, but I had family and you.

So I was visiting my family and then coming back to work in paris. There were these new buses with wifi. So I think OK.

let's give you to try. So he sit in there on the bus, he's on his laptop, he's doing some work, and he notices that on the screen. Next.

my neighbor was watching each videos. For a very long time.

the guy was just going from one recommended video to the next recommended video to the next, to the next .

part of me was pretty proud that I was allowed. So I help him so much. I was kind of curious which recommendations who are so good that he was so captivated by youtube.

Then I said he was watching conspiracy theories about a secret plan to kill two billion people. So naturally, I try to make a joke with him. Who who wants to kill us, try to initiate conversation.

And he told me, how does this secret plan look at IT? Because media's are not going to tell you about IT. But if you look on youtube, you'll find all the truth. Then we talked about the videos on, I could be bank videos won by one, but I couldn't depend the plot because he told me, like, there are so many videos .

like that has .

to be true.

Was pretty intense because I knew the number. So I knew that this was not just one person. This IT was millions of people who wear in these situations.

Hi everybody, is end on. Let's dip into the list, mail back again.

So try to see how far we can go back in the world if we search history. I done there. yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yes, I remember this. Okay, now look.

this is a wish cultural .

system design to use the deep say.

come on, my nation, be populated .

by and reflect the culture of people who have comfort. 但是。