Will Social Media Destroy Us All?

When you're watching this from the outside and you're seeing all this technology develop, are you concerned at all when you see how addicted people are to their phones? Because this, like, your games are very addictive in the best ways, right? Quake is super addictive. It's really fun. It's great to play and that's why it's addictive because you just want to get that charge, that rush to get back in there. But the odd thing to me about cell phone addiction is there's not much thrill. It's a weird addiction where you're just constantly checking and nothing's coming back. Like people are just constantly checking their email and their Twitter messages, their DMs and YouTube videos, but there's not a lot coming back at you. I'm concerned. I see this thing where you'll go to a place and you'll see 80% of the people just looking at their phones and not interacting with people. Do you ever, like, look at that and go, where's this going? So I do think about this in a way that, because this is one of these things where I recognize it in some other people where I think I probably do interact with things a little bit differently. And I am sometimes conscious of the fact that most people don't think about things the way I do. And it's clear that, yes, a lot of people just, they get rage out of Twitter and I can see it. Some people, it's probably bad for them doing some of these social media things. But I mean, I get inspiration out of Twitter. I mean, my feed I'm going through, I'm seeing brilliant scientists, new research developments, wonderful art from people, hard workers developing products. And I just look at this as like, this is this amazing set of human beings that are building the future. And I've got this window into their mind. It winds up being a very positive thing for me. But I do see the people that just wind up having, that it is a negative aspect for them. And I don't know what to do about that because I mean, talking about people issues are obviously not my strong suit. I'm the nuts and bolts or bits and bytes technology person and social challenges. I mean, that's one of the things that probably over, you know, over decades, I've just come to be more at peace with the fact that I probably do think a bit differently than most people. I don't expect them to, you know, to think necessarily like I do. And in many ways, that keeps me from being upset at a lot of people and just say, well, people are different. They're not going to process these things the same way that I do. But yeah, I can see it as potentially a problem. But I do think also there's this ability for people to, people always want to say, it's okay, put down your phone. Why aren't you living in the real world? And there's another aspect of that where for many people, the world that you get in the virtual world, whether it's on your phone or all the way to VR, the whole reason you do that should be because it's better than the world that you're choosing to step away from. And again, it's harder for many people that are in an elite thought leader position. If your life is awesome in every way, then yeah, you don't need that much from the virtual world, whether it's on a cell phone or virtual reality. I mean, if you've been, you know, courtside, backstage, pit lane, whatever, if you've done all of these things in real life, the VR version of it is not going to be that compelling. And if you saw people, you know, fixated and all of that, you'd probably think those people are not living in reality. They should just be living in reality. But for so many people, I, you know, what they get the people on the other side of the phone that they're interacting with, that's read, that's where they'd rather be. The fact that people can find their tribe out of the billions of people in the world, even if they live in some podunk town in the Midwest, I think that's a really wonderful thing. So while, yes, there is a negative tale on one side from it, I think that this connecting everyone is largely a good thing on net. There are downsides. Maybe there should be things we should be doing to mitigate the downsides. But I think this connection of humanity is on that a positive thing. I tend to agree with you that it is a positive thing. I think philosophically, I think the way we understand each other, the way we communicate, it's very radically different than our grandparents. And all of it seems to be moving in a place where we understand each other better. And you're going to have your side effects like Twitter rage and social media bias and, you know, these confirmation bias groups where people just sit in these echo chambers and reiterate the same ideas over and over again in each other. And you're also going to get people that are understanding cultures, understanding each other, understanding psychology, understanding the way the mind works and getting access to information at a rate that's unprecedented in terms of the knowledge that you can get. Like just being able to Google things. I mean, just, you know, and nobody, you know, nobody can actually give them credit for it. And like Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook leadership, they talk about the mission is to connect the world. And you know, of course it's like, oh, okay, of course the Facebook CEO is going to be mouth in these things. But like I really legitimately do think that the Facebook leadership is doing this because they think that's a positive thing. And I agree with them. Now I'm not a very social person. I'm an introvert. I'm a hermit mode sort of person so much of the time. But I think that this is again, a good thing that connecting more people, giving them the opportunity to find people that they wouldn't otherwise be interacting with people they wouldn't even have known existed in many cases. I think we'll come out of this, you know, looking back decades in the future. There will have been all the tragic things that happened with social media, but on net it's going to be good.