Digital Wellbeing Is The Path To Reclaim Agency In An AI Post-Capitalist World - Caitlin Krause

Hi, welcome. I'm Charlie Fink. I want to give you a quick preview of what we have in store. Our guest is Caitlin Krause, author of Digital Wellbeing. And in the news, we have TikTok finally closing its deal to spin off its U.S. business to a consortium led by Oracle, among others, for the bargain price of around $50 billion when you consider that the price of Meta, which is Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp is upwards of $2 trillion. I think you could see that's a pretty damn good deal. So congratulations to all you Oracle shareholders. Maybe that'll offset your losses for the data centers that it turns out are almost impossible to build. All righty. So we have a great show coming up. Caitlin's a great guest. We had a great conversation with her. Thanks again for tuning in. This episode of the AIXR podcast is brought to you by Zapper, the folks behind MatterCraft, the leading visual development environment for building immersive 3D web experiences for mobile headsets and desktop. MatterCraft combines the power of a game engine with the flexibility of the web and now features an AI assistant that helps you design code and debug in real time right in your browser. Whether you're a dev, designer, or just getting started, MatterCraft speeds up your workflow and brings your 3D ideas to life faster than ever. Start building smarter at mattercraft.io. Good morning, everybody. I'm Charlie Fink with Roni Ababitz and Ted Shilowitz for the AIXR podcast. It's Friday, December 19th, 2025. We're back from our special trip to Florida. And apparently that last week's episode is doing really well. A lot of people are listening to it. We had a lot of really great guests, thanks to Roni and what he put on at SynthBee. So was an exciting week. It was like a greatest hits episode. It was like one of those albums where you got 25 guest musicians all jamming like the last waltz. The hits just keep on coming. Hopefully it's not our last waltz, but it was a really good episode. And the 12-year-old stole the show again. Oh my God. Yes. So for our listeners that are listening this week, if you haven't listened to last week's episode, we think you'll enjoy it. There's a lot of really good insights about AI and the future and where things are going. And we're all together in person and it was fun. So the news this week, Ted and I had to restrain ourselves in the green room because, of course, the TikTok deal. I was saying tick, tick, boom. Tick, tick, boom, baby. I know. I should have come up with something clever like that for a headline this week and I missed my chance. Well, what do you guys think? $14 billion, paltry sum or overpriced, overvalued? I think that it's the deal of the century if you're basing it off of anything similar to the valuation of Facebook and Instagram. yeah it's certainly i mean what's instagram worth well i mean what did they buy half a trillion dollars i don't know what they what did zuckerberg buy it for 10 years 11 billion a billion yeah was it 1 billion or 11 billion no one billion but it was only like 10 or 11 people yeah 10 that's what it was 10 11 people yeah it was like a handful of people but a billion and people didn't realize what it would become yeah yeah yeah they were it was like the most valuable per employee count of company any company ever acquired right but it was a good buy because it turned incredible Of course. Well, it kept Facebook relevant. It kept Facebook connected to the youth, right? And that was what they needed. They were starting to become mom book on Facebook, and they needed a different product. And then they tried it with WhatsApp, which apparently they spent a huge, huge amount of money for in the many, many billions. $18 billion. $19 billion, something. Yes. And it still hasn't been a profit center for them. WhatsApp is not a profit center for them. But it does connect people globally. So there is some kind of value, and some people don't realize this, but all the signals in WhatsApp, the voice and the data, what do you think is training Facebook AIs? Yep, yep. So it all feeds to this bigger mission, right? Yes. So speaking of Meta, Meta has, as we talked about, I guess, last week or the week before, they've made a 30% cut in reality labs, which they have been threatening to do since last year. And then, and they talked about it in their earnings call. The stock went up because of it, as I predicted, you know, slashing 30% from reality labs, $4 billion quarterly loss was greeted with tremendous enthusiasm from investors. But they explained in the call that they were moving it over to AI. And AI, there's a lot of pressure on them about the cost of AI and the return on investment and how all that's going to be measured. And so I think that took some pressure off. But then the following day, they trot out Bosworth to talk to the press. Bosworth is in charge of MetaReality Labs. He's the CTO of the company. And he's running around saying the 30% is not really going away. It's going into design research. It's going into AI. The AI is fundamental to the glasses. True. And the, you know, Ray-Bans are selling great, which I don't think 2 million is great, but okay. I love them. Great product. So we'll see. Great by an order of like, I talk about almost every week of the podcast that virtual reality and XR as a format is an exotic format and will likely always be an exotic format. So I think maybe Meta has finally realized that as well. And they need to factor that into their development spend. Like it shouldn't be overspent on. They need to spend the right amount of money for the market share that they will capture and the importance of that platform as it develops and potentially over many years becomes a mainstream product. So here's the contradictory. So, Ted, you and I have always had this debate. I think the issue you've got is I think they now know at Reality Labs, what we knew probably in 2018 at Magic Leap, what you need to do to get to the form factor and weight and specs that unlock a billion users. Yes. And let's say they can more accurately determine that costs $200 billion. And everything under that you believe is like just sub-threshold and doesn't unlock that. Now, that could be wrong, but I think they're getting enough information of like, what is the size, weight, performance, field of view, resolution, sensing to go, this is something people will use every day. And the human body just has very strict thresholding on it. Do you just slowly do that and try to climb slowly or just go for it? And if you're wrong, if you invest another 200 billion and you hit the golden form factor and it still doesn't do it, that's a huge mess. Right, which is my opinion that you should always climb slowly. You should be cautious and careful with your spend and be aware of what the market dynamics will do with a product that is still not at its sweet spot, right? And look, I understand where the spend dynamics come from. They're all reaching for what potentially is the next platform. They know they can't do it with laptops. They know they can't do it with tablets. They know they can't do it with smartphones. Those ships have already sails. The XR platform is a ship that is still leaving the port, right? And there are multiple companies that have a chance to topple sort of the big boys, which is Apple and Microsoft, right? And Google with Android. So it's an opportunity zone, but I think they've always overspent on that opportunity zone. I think, Charlie, you tend to agree with me on that, right? Well, there's an enormous opportunity here for Apple, right? These guys are doing nothing but marketing Apple's AI smart glasses with or without a display. Again, Brody and I agree and disagree about this. I don't think the display is important right now, as important as AI and geolocation and marrying that computer streaming computer vision and a semantic understanding of the world so that you're basically wearing a Tesla headset. You're wearing a Tesla on your head. And so I think that's going to be really important. It probably is a form factor for Apple glasses. I worry after their design fucking failure with the Vision Pro, I worry that they have that design mojo. Look, we're AI XR. Can we use AI as a counter? If you sum all the costs to build the internet, the CPU, GPU power that allows us to do like vidgen and some of the basic AI today, you are in the many, many, many hundreds of billions, maybe like a trillion dollars. And it was done collectively by many companies. So XR may be on the same path that it might need 500, 800 billion collectively across the whole supply chain to finally crack the barrier where what OpenAI and Gemini and others started doing in 2020, 2021 was a result of like Alan Turing till 21. A huge sum of cumulative investment, like you were saying, Ted. Now, some companies are impatient, want to just go there now and just push it all on their own. But it may be another 500 billion to build all of the critical mass components of everything coming together, right? Right. Remember we had the guest was a couple of weeks ago that said it's really like 40 gram weight. 100 gram is not you want 40 gram, 100 degree field of view. You want retina resolution, which is probably like 70 degrees plus per pixel, 12 hour back. All these kind of things that will eventually happen, like the kind of compute we have now to chat with like chat GPT or to do a Sora video or to do a mid journey thing is not an invention of like mid journey. right my friend david holtz founded mid-journey he is sitting on top of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of investment that finally allowed him to build mid-journey on top of that huge mountain of stuff so the question is when is that mountain tall enough and i think reality labs to bring this back has taken on trying to build the mountain mostly on their own right so i don't mark's not thinking anyone else is putting out enough investment fast enough and he's doing like fundamental government level investment in building the stack yeah well and like charlie you wrote in your column this week about our friend Tony, who has demoed the TCL glasses. And that's a little nugget of what I would consider small spend, correct spend, to start to get that weight down. It's, I think, under 80 grams. So it's not 40, but it's 80, right? And he says, in some ways, it's more advanced than the Meta Ray-Bans. Like it's a better display. It's a better concept. It's not nearly as well marketed. It's not nearly as well spent on. And in many cases, that's the better path, right? Spend less, innovate more. That's always my take on this. So CES is three weeks away. Yeah. Oh, first of all, pimping the sixth annual podcast CES party this year at the Beast. The price has gone down. We have an open bar. We have Felix and Paul have invited everybody to check out Interstellar, which we talked about with Paul Raphael last month. Yeah, we're all going to go as a group. It's going to be great. It's going to be a lot of fun. Exactly. So if you want an invitation to the party, email me and or go to my website and send me a message there. I'm on all the socials all the time. So come on and hang out with us and network. It's a great networking event. So everybody has a great time every year. Hey, by the way, we never loop back on the TikTok thing. We made our joke, tick, tick, boom, but we never actually said what the hell is going on with TikTok right now. Well, so it's Oracle Silver Lake and an Abu Dhabi company, MGX. and they're going to own 45% and ByteDance keeps 20% and the remaining 35%, they don't exactly say. Maybe you and I can buy some. I think your name has to be Jared Kushner. And I do think it's a steal. At $14 million for 45% of TikTok, TikTok is a very, very valuable media property today. Yeah. And it'll continue to grow, I think, yeah. Yeah, I think so too. So anyway, good for Larry Ellison and the shareholders of Oracle. Well, a bright spot in the Larry Ellison. That's right, because they've been getting hammered left and right for, first of all, their overinvestment in data centers, which it turns out, even with the help of the government, are going to take a long time to build and cost a ton of money. Well, and his son, David, keeps trying to raise the bid on Warner Brothers to keep it away from Netflix taking all of daddy's money and saying, daddy, I want all that money. So we'll see what happens. The thing that doesn't get talked about in those offers is the amount of debt that Warner Brothers has that the acquirer would have to take on, which is what has made the stock radioactive for the past several years. I mean, AT&T pillaged that thing. Warner Brothers' golden parachutes revealed. CEO David Zaslav stands to gain $567 million if Netflix goes through. CFO will receive $144 million. CRO, Chief Revenue Officer Bruce Campbell, will receive $138 million. So these guys will cash out big time, the biggest golden parachutes in the world, if these Netflix deals come through. And they'll probably end up laying off 5,000 to 7,000 people in the process. How is that right? How is that a healthy ecosystem? I feel a little like Bernie Sanders, but how is that right? It isn't. But we are just three little people on a weekly podcast. but now we're inviting Caitlin Krauss to join us. She's the author of Digital Wellbeing, an old friend, a great advocate in the industry. Her book, Digital Wellbeing, came out a few months ago. How's it going, Caitlin? Is the book getting out there? Oh, yeah. And it's great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on the show. Feel free to just continue to banter. I'm happily joining here. Yeah, the book's been really well received Charlie and this is across you know it kind of goes trans media and into different populations so we can talk about that so how do the two of you know each other Charlie Caitlin what the background there I think we met probably back in 2018. We had a great sit down at South by Southwest a couple of years. I feel like, you know, we had a really, really intimate conversation that you don't often have with the work colleague. Caitlin and I have a connection. I also love her book. I wrote a review about it and I ran into her at AWE and it's like, we got to get you on the podcast. Of course, here we are six months later. So apologies about that. I think you canceled once and I canceled once. This is how we roll. I think we've been global and yeah, funny story. I had already known about Charlie, Charlie's work. I think we had known about each other, but about 20, it could have been 16 or 17. We were both at AR in action with John. Oh my gosh. At the MIT media lab. Yes. Yes. I think that was 2016. Holy crow. So, so this was a great event. And Charlie was, can I tell this? You were shipping books. Your book was coming out. And I think it was one of the first books that was AR enabled. Like you could have the AR. That pop-ups, that's correct. Pop-ups and storytelling. And there was a giant snowstorm in Boston. That's right. And the books never got there. Well, but Charlie was there. And so I feel like that was everybody who had these great conversations. You know, and I think that's the thing you asked me, how's the book being received? And I feel like a book is really just a tool for conversation. And I wanted to write something that you could read in different orders. You could skip around the chapter. Do you have a copy of your book you can hold up? I actually do. Like they do on all the TV shows? I know because my background is a little bit. For the hundred people who are, oh, there we go. Oh, there it is. Okay. So it's called Digital Wellbeing. It is. And it looks like a real book. It's like in hardcover. It's the real deal. It's a book. And yours is dog-eared and you've got all kinds of notes in it and stuff. So why don't you tell us about your journey as an author and what is digital well-being all about? Thanks so much. So this is my sixth book, you know, and I grew up actually loving books. I was an English major. I went to college. I wanted to be an astronaut like all of us might have. We're still trying to be astronauts, by the way. We're all working on it. I think we're building it in the metaverse in different ways. And I'm being serious about that. I, yeah, so I was, I still am this science brain and also arts and not wanting to be silo inside a full scholarship through the military. And I was studying, you know, everything from, oh, yeah. Oh, this is, this is why we celebrate at the holidays. Yes. We all have all kinds of science stuff we could show you in space stuff in our, in our collections, but keep going. I wish I had brought more on the road. Because many more people listen to this than watch it. So they have no idea what we're talking about right now. I won't show props. But yeah, I think the point is that I was studying so many different things and trying to combine them and very, very intersectional at the time. And I just fell in love with this idea that we can be designers in our life. And I think that idea of life design has always been a through line, whether it's my work in education, whether it's my work in media labs, XR environments, you know, and I think I think back to just the fullness of the question. I think you have to hone me in. What would be the seed that you want? So you said designers of our life, like we'll use the three of us as a litmus test to this. And in terms of the three of us, I would say Charlie is the most overtly social in terms of his use of social media tools. Roni and I are probably the least. I'm maybe the most least. I am almost anti-social when it comes to social media, although I'm a very social person. I like to communicate. I give lots of presentations around the world. I spend a lot of time with people. But I find the tool sets, the Facebooks, the Instagrams, the ways that people like try and share their lives with the world relatively offensive and valueless. I like real connections and real things. And I like less stuff, not an overwhelming palette of stuff that I can't even navigate through. So my digital wellness is a version of that. That's how I navigate myself is I would just refer to myself as an antisocial social person when it comes to technology. Although I'm a hyper technologist, I use all kinds of technology all the time and I'm very bullish on it. So where would I fit in your thesis of digital wellness? Am I healthy, unhealthy? You're more well than most of us. Really? Thank you for giving me a little boundary there. Yeah, sure. No, the six books, I think where I was going with that is that three of them are poetry and fiction and three are nonfiction. And this book is nonfiction, but it was written from a storytelling perspective and very non-binary. A lot of people see digital well-being and they'll joke and say, oh, isn't that an oxymoron? Like you can't, it's sapping our energy, it's taking our attention. when they're thinking about social as destructive. And I think Web 2.0 or whatever happened with the internet was just grabbing attention. And we can do something different with this age of AI. I agree. I don't want to be an algorithm. I don't want to be someone's algorithm. I want to be my own person that makes my own decisions. And I think a lot of people feel that, but they can't get out of the trap. The trap is so strong. It's like drug addiction. It is so strong that once you're in the trap, You feel like you've got to feed that monster, feed that machine. And I don't like that. I don't like to fall into that trap. Yeah. So my background, in addition to being a programmer out of school, is in mindfulness, design, and storytelling. So in this book, I worked really hard to combine how do people get back to turning the volume down on all of the noise and going into their intention and then seeing how we can. It's not an if. It's a how. how we can match intention with attention practices. I teach this at Stanford. I taught at University of Oregon this fall. I really love being attached to great research and universities, but not viewing it siloed. So I think in this book, I tried to be playful, even though it's a serious proposition. Like we have more suicide than ever. People are feeling lonely. I think the loneliness epidemic could be mislabeled because in my research, loneliness is a human prompt to find another human, not just to be entertained. So I really wanted to look at, well, how can XR environments and how can our work in virtual reality bring people into different forms of connection, like asynchronous connection, ambient awareness of each other. For all of us who are, I'm part introvert. I don't want hyper social noise. So you'll find it's not just about the book, but I felt compelled to write this because so many people were telling me, oh, I went to a meditation retreat and then I came back to the noise or, you know, I need to deactivate all of my social media accounts and then find peace again. And I thought, well, the future of tech can't be that it's all people use that phrase digital detox and the whole supposition is that the digital is toxic. And I'm like, oh, it's not toxic in my world. That's why the publisher said, let's make a human hand and a robot arm meeting in the middle. And I thought, well, it's a little reductive. And I've seen it before. And I wanted to write something that empowers people to tap into imagination. So when you talk to your students at Stanford, is it Stanford and MIT, or you're in Oregon, you said? University of Oregon. Are they sort of backlashing against social media? Do they feel like it's a negative force in their life? Do they feel like it's a positive force? Like when you teach them this digital wellness in your classes, how does that manifest itself? How does it, and what do the students tell you? Like, what's the feedback you get? Thanks, thanks for asking. I do this in corporate workshops too, by the way, places like the Air Force, places like LinkedIn. But for all ages, people tell me, well, a lot of them tell me that they'll either have separate accounts, some kind of speed bump to keep them aware. There's a lot of question about what you pointed to before, like sovereignty. Jerome Lanier said data dignity. You know, I believe that's important. So we talk about it and talk about daily habits and try to make it not like binary. You can't, there's no code to this. So when I look at digital well-being, I'm looking at it from a dynamic kind of curious standpoint. So I'll say to them, more students come in and they feel some sense of shame. Like, oh, I have a really bad relationship with either gaming or tech. And sometimes the first few classes, we're just kind of observing, I'll say. How are people sleeping? Not very well. And a lot of them have different habits like they might be using. I'm really interested in biometrics and trackers. and how people feel when they're using them for things like exercise or movement. So we talk about both what augmented tech people are using, and whether after it gives them a better sense of agency and energy, or whether they feel depleted and like it's habitual in a way where they can't stop. And we frame it like relationship. What is a human-to-human relationship mediated by tech? Caitlin, I was going to ask, we studied a lot of at least biologic and psychological health when we were building up Magic Leap and what ultimately things needed to be. It seems like right now the folks that make the most money in the field maximize your addiction, the micro-influence of how they can manipulate your neurotransmitters. There's nothing healthy about it, about how they're doing it. Games are meant to be addictive. That's how you get funding. social media is like micro addictive it's all like somewhere between crack and nicotine then there's like yeah are you learning anything and there's like occasionally something that really is exercising the right muscles in the brain but one of the things we learned i'd love to get your take on it if you walk in a forest let's say by big sir the fractal signals the the spatial nature of all that is like never going to hurt your brain or body or mind. It is like they connect perfectly. The brain wants these very natural fractal signals that come from being in nature. When people like unplug and they go to the ocean and they go hear those sounds and they're with trees and stuff, there's actually visual signal and sound signal that cleans your brain. And digital things are totally not the same. Like if you actually look at the fractal nature of digital signals, they're not what our brain evolved to. Our brain evolved in a very different signal path. So we became obsessed with like, what are those sound signals? What are those visual signals, the tactile signals? I think part of the digital health is that everything we're shoving at people is unnatural on a tiny screen or a big screen, but it's not what this is evolved to. And then there's the psychological addiction that's happening, which a lot of folks in gaming and others, not all, there's some other game designers who are like creating a good novel. You get enrichment from it. But a lot of the industry, it gives you money to people that get you addicted to hit a red button like a monkey hitting a button in a cocaine lab where they're just testing the monkey. So like, what's your take on the motivations and also the physics and biology of all things digital? I think you just put the conversation to a different level. So yeah, I think we're at the tip of being able to tell even more that backs up what we know. So science is proving this out. I hope that digital doesn't just try to, we're already trying to mimic certain things that are addictive. Like you said, it's the wrong algorithm. It's the wrong priority. And I've been interested in the emotion of awe and wonder. As you bring up Big Sur and I'm thinking, oh, yeah, what brings us in this emotional resonance with something that not just lets us slow down, but lets us literally be in the moment, just moment by moment awareness without. I'm a big fan of mind wandering. And, you know, I asked Jon Kabat-Zinn, does that make it a less effective form of mindfulness if you find yourself surfing wonder, which I'd also written about? And he said, no, that's a great level of meditation. It's just so many people are spending time right now in anxiety states. And so just the fact of being present and we're biological. So you're pointing to we're not in nature. We're part of nature. So we get to that nature state. And there are so many perceptions that we have that are feeling that resonance. And so the conundrum is does digital try to mimic that? I've been most interested in sound because sound taps into emotion right away and you can use different sounds and you know it's it's something that right now doesn't need a heavy headset you know you can you can have someone in an environment where it's almost like a spatial sound garden so I've been playing with that idea of people being in a garden space where they discover different elements that cause them to feel curiosity look up I see 10 has a thought I just want to throw out a bit of a counter argument just for debate sake and to spice this up a little bit to give a little point counterpoint. And I'll preface this by saying, I don't necessarily agree with all of this thesis, but I agree with part of this thesis, which I think is a bit of a counter to the like, digital is bad, the outdoors is good. I think we would all agree because our parents said, go out and play, right? That's a good idea. But I also see a lot of people that I would say are a generation younger than me typically, but not always, that have built a digital realm that is just as important, if not their most important reality. So these are gamers typically that will spend hours and hours and hours within these digital realms. They're looking for bigger and bigger screens, more immersive screens that give them the illusion of being someplace else, right? And they build their whole lifestyle around a digital universe. They play, live, exist, and communicate with others in that digital realm. And I would argue that a lot of them are probably relatively healthy, well-adjusted, well-balanced kids, although they will feel very nerdy to us, right? They will feel very, They're not outdoorsy kids, but that's not necessarily a value judgment of one is more relevant than the other. They have found their world and their importance within a digital landscape. And that landscape is incredibly sophisticated. And by the way, many of them have very, very successful careers and career arcs within technology because they grew up playing video games to an almost obsessive level. So where does that fit into your thesis? And like I said, I don't necessarily subscribe to all that, but I'm aware of that as a success point, that some kids are not destined to walk the forest all day long, right? Some kids are destined to walk a digital forest all day long and find that as their happy place. So I'm curious where that fits into your thesis. my thesis and i talked about this with kent by and we brought up this idea of the middle path which doesn't mean wishy-washy i'm not arguing both but i'm saying both and i think that science is going to prove out more about our bio states and our body states and what's happening in that relationship because there's still a relationship my thesis would say and it's it's also in the book great examples like you said of gamers and people finding belonging and people who thought oh i don't You know, I don't have a place, having a place and having worlds that they have agency. There's a wheel where I point out if you have environments where you can focus on dignity first, that leads to freedom, leads to invention, leads to agency. You know, and I'd been teaching middle school and high school for 10 years all over the world in international programs developing curriculum, which kind of led to this arc of my career path. falling in love with XR and seeing what different tech can do for giving people that sense of creativity and expression. And, both and, I think that it's parts of the system are toxic right now because they're prioritizing engagement, base level of the brainstem, a lot of anthropomorphizing, even using some elements of the system to be don't get me started on on human-like therapists and things like that so i just i think that again this is why i really like using great research because the research is going to help us design for play you know and like we were talking about magic leap some of those beginning explorations were really prioritizing asking better questions I think not enough people are considerate. I keep asking, we keep going toward AGI, where's consciousness? Like, where's the consideration right now for how we're building and what we're prioritizing? Well, it's interesting because you've opened that door to XR as this, in some ways, beautiful landscape of the future, where there are so many people trying to build that better world. In many cases, people can't get to that state in the real world. So they actually want to use a virtualized version of that. There are meditation apps and therapy apps that all have, I would say, you know, healthy aims. But I think your point, which is well taken, is always, and this is well discussed with a lot of people in the industry, is if you look at the end goal of a technology company, you can often see where their motivations lie, right? If their end goal is maximizing shareholder value and owning and keeping market share and keeping people on their platform, that is ultimately not a healthy goal, right? For the people that use that platform. Because the goal of the company is to maximize shareholder value, not to maximize value for the person using that technology. Human health. Yeah. Yeah. So I tend to agree with that. And we are often frustrated that these big tech companies do not take enough responsibility for what they have done to humanity. Okay. Let me ask you a question. Like, I think I share the same belief, but that there is a world of like competing intelligence and synthetic realities that are so tuned to our well-being, what's good for people. It's like eating a healthy meal or reading a good novel. Like it enriches you. And then there's like many pathways. I think it's asymmetrical. I think the number of pathways that you're being fed fast food or some toxic cigarette like nicotine of digital is the easy way to make a lot of money. And the other path, the one that's good for us, for some reason, it's extremely hard to do. I don't know why the universe is like this, but it's like all the paths that are easy are not good for us. And the paths that are hard to take work, they seem to be the ones that are good. So one, I don't understand why that is. I don't know if you have a view on that. But are you kind of believing that there is a path where you still can be in these digital realms, but it unlocks goodness for people? But I kind of believe in the asymmetry, too, that it's so easy to just do all this like fast food junk, harmful your brain, harmful your body, addictive, screws up your social life. The question is, why do you think it's so asymmetrical? AI is also asymmetrical. It's so easy to build an AI that's just like hallucinatory and delusional and lying to you, but very hard to do something that's actually positive for people. Like what's going on there? I definitely want to hear what Caitlin has to say on this. And then I will give a real world example that Roni and I participated in last week in Florida, Caitlin, to get your opinion on it. I will tell you what we did. Why is it asymmetrical? Why is it so hard to do this right? Because we did a mutual one, but I want to hear your opinion first before we go into that. Okay, I'll share my opinion. And then this is my fun object for the episode, a Twisby pen. So I have a Twisby that I travel with. It looks very expensive. It looks very exotic. Not that expensive, but it's really fun from Japan. It has ink in it that I can sell myself that is from a brand called Troublemaker. So the messages make good trouble. and I wrote down asymmetrical because I feel like that's a great way. I'm like literally on their website right now because I do like fountain pens. So that's super cool. Yeah. So that's my shout out. I'm not. Free advertising for Twisby. I'm not sponsored by Twisby. I'm checking it out too, right? That is some writing longhand. I never do that anymore. They could sponsor us, Charlie. We're good with them. Yeah. I keep journals. Sam Altman does too. I learned that the other day on an interview. Oh, really? Yeah. He writes on paper. They write on paper. I carry them around. It's not what I had to eat or what I did. It's more the in-between moments of things that are curiosities and little words that cause me to feel a lift. And I was thinking about, as you were saying, asymmetry. I feel like the issue right now is that people haven't, it's kind of like a buffet where people don't know what they're missing. and without this sounding too woo-woo flow state, I think that humans thrive on a little bit of friction, a little bit of challenge. Like we actually like dance partners that give us pushback and I think some people right now when you're asking, well, why is it the fast food, the easy? I have a hope. I'm a realist but an idealist. I hope that people will have a range of media past this stage of kind of a glut that's going to give them those tastes and that friction and that beautiful kind of flow state is Csikszentmihalyi's research, the challenge skills balance. And I think when people are in that state, they feel like they come alive. So I keep asking people, what makes you feel alive? How can we blend more of that into the priorities with tech so it's not just ethical checkboxes? And I think maybe spelling it out, giving more examples. You know, when I'm teaching classes, my students will literally leave the arc of a course and tell me, I feel like I got my life back. I feel like I know more about what I want and what path is there for me. And yeah, so I think it's partly design principles and partly that's idea of where is our individual and collective flow state and how can we make that more obvious so other people have new patterns. Charlie, you want to throw a nugget in? You've been awfully quiet. I do, because I think that social media and digital media generally, all this has happened over the past 30 years, which is tremendously quickly. I teach a course on emerging media. I mean, emerging media, that's my lifetime. And we have willingly participated in the largest psychological experiment ever conducted at this scale on man. And I know the companies at first didn't know that they were doing that, and we did not know what we were giving away when we did that. But things have evolved, and these companies are actively fighting over our attention and our engagement and over influence over us, influence which is usually opaque. So I think that is part of the problem. The other thing that's going on as these platforms become more aware of the influence and their ability to control people's time and their attitude is they have shifted away from it being social. It's not that social anymore. It's personal. But I don't use it to be in touch with anybody anymore. I don't, you know, in the five years ago or 10 years ago, you looked at Facebook and you're like, oh, this is what's going on with my classmates and former students and former colleagues. But now I'm using it for entertainment. I'm using it for communication. It's just another version of TikTok for most people. Yeah, it's another version of TikTok. And that's how Instagram and Facebook remained competitive. And the way they survived, for example, Apple putting a bullet in their ability to follow people on the Apple platform, they've used AI, which has given them more of an advantage than that follow algorithm ever did. So, and I don't know, you know, we are addicted to the benefits of it, you know, and there have been positive benefits as well. We were always excited in the early days about the fact there were no more gatekeepers. And I think that is an exciting aspect of social media and people craving authentic media. I mean, all the good things happen on social media. It's not all negative, but it's control over my time and attention is pernicious. It isolates me. It's getting better at isolating me. I have a very hard time with digital detox. And I will say this as my parting shot on this ramble, is that it's changed not just our relationships with our friends, but our relationships within our families. We have a family group chat, which is great. But meanwhile, and I am, unlike my parents and their parents and the 400,000 generations of thinks before them, you know, my relationships are lesser than they would have been 40 years ago before the digital age began because I am infinitely available, but rarely fully present. So just bringing this back to you, Caitlin, because I thought this was, and we've talked about this, this was the profound part of the book for me, is trying to find a way to keep the positive benefits of it, you know, while trying to mitigate the negative harm. And I think it is really, really, really hard to mitigate the negative harm. I don't know if we can do it. And it's an experiment. No one knows. That is the scary part. We're in the middle of this. It's the first time man has ever been subjected to this. It's interesting because 400 years ago, our ancestors lived much as they did a millennia or two millennia or five millennia before. So there's been more change, not only since the Industrial Revolution, but since the Digital Revolution than mankind experienced in 400,000 years. So we don't know what's going to happen. And now AI is making us question what is true. So, you know, we are in a very, very strange place, my friends, because this has never happened to humans before. It is an experiment on a scale that is, this is why the zombie movies are popular, right? These are people getting affected with a virus right And infecting other people with the same virus You know we infecting our children with this virus of being addicted to our phones Well that why I watching this show which a lot of people are watching, Vince Gilligan's new show on Apple TV called Pluribus. Yes, we just watched the first episode yesterday. I think my wife and I are about three or four episodes in, and I keep saying, this is not a story about aliens. This is a story about AI. Like this is a parable about what AI does when you're not keeping a close eye on it. And Caitlin is nodding her head vigorously. So maybe she wants to go there. I do want to go there. And I, oh gosh, it's a dark. I am friends with Howard Reingold. We talk about the well. Remember the well? I just think there's a lot to be said for non-consensus and for people questioning. And I was going to feed it back to Charlie. What would you say, or it could be everybody, if we could just start from scratch and we didn't have this? I'm wondering if we could flip this and just say that the past 200, 300 years have been capitalist structure, competitive function. And I've been thinking lately about open source and about how, because I think this idea of digital well-being, you can find it, and I keep holding up the book just as a colorful symbol, but you can find it on a personal level and a collective level. And it does involve a certain loss of egocentric me, mine. And I just think, again, what would be the higher view? Because I think we do design an XR sometimes based on different first principles. So what would be the first principles? The first principle is what Australia just did, which is take smartphones away from kids. So alien invasion, yeah. Force the kids to interact with each other and with people in their family and not have this safety valve, if you will, that is constantly available and becomes instantly an avoidant crunch, a crunch. So I think I'm in favor of that. I don't like rules generally, and I don't like rules especially that adults impose on kids. But in this case, the harm is enough, like nicotine, that you want to keep it away from them until they have some developed measure of reasoning. Now, I have no doubt they'll instantly become addicted when they're 18 instead of when they're 13. But at least they're building on a socialization which is grounded in the physical world. Okay. So that's developmental. then what about business principles and how i still have hope that xr could be involved gaming could be involved seymour papert project passion peers play we can we can use digital in better ways so then how when they get to be teenagers it becomes this core discussion about as difficult as because you open up this crazy can of worms it's ultimately capitalism versus socialism, right? And if the ultimate goal of all these technologies that affect humanity is a version of capitalism, we want to be the biggest, the most dominant. We want to own the share of people's time in a way, and we don't really care about their health. We may feign that care. We may present it as caring. Like Charlie makes a good point about there are certain parts of social media dynamics that are wonderful and healthy. There's like Facebook groups and therapy groups and marketplaces where people sell their stuff and so forth and so on. They keep that as a layer of the good so that they can purvey the bad at the same time. Let me add something because I'd love to get your take on it. This is our big existential question for Friday. Ted, you pose capitalism versus socialism. The interesting thing is if you take capitalism to the extreme with AI and computing intelligence following that curve, you eventually have a post-work society where compute systems outperform humans. And I already see this, and it's going to be true for sure across many, many sectors in the next few years. They just outperform us. So we're in a post-work society. So the extreme asymptotic capitalism leads to something. And Caitlin, what have you a view of like, what is that something? You know, Sam Altman is all about universal basic income. And that's like the Ready Player One world, I think like people in trailer parks and VR being pacified why the emperors go live on Mars or something. What is your view of that world? Because I think we are soon going to be in a post-capitalistic society because the outcome of capitalism has led to free market push on computing, which outperforms humans. So now you'll have all these people that don't need to work. Work is getting done somehow. What are we doing? What is our wellness when we don't need to go to work to to to get money and what's happening either of riots or something else like what's your something else what's our function yeah what do we do what's like what's the other thing we do and robots and ai do everything else for us what's our sense of purpose it's it's a it's a messy middle because i think we were conditioned with different values so it's going to take maybe several generations to do a reset and you're approaching it i love from a sci-fi angle i grew up loving asima loving i mean i've been reading ursula k le guinn the left hand of darkness i'm just shouting that out too in case people great books yeah need a read over the break but did anyone watch the film arrival okay so so language we have new literacies right now i think the challenge is teaching this new literacy and also on the flip side what what is enough i i hope it's not trailer park create a pellet to pacify people because that sounds really brave new world and soma and and i think people need to ask for better better like what do you actually desire and if the if the greatest asset is actually time and attention what can give it back to us so that's the proposition I'm posing with digital well-being. Like what's elevating our ask for what's enough and not the things that we have, commodities, but you know, the Harvard study that after the whole lifespan, the biggest boon was quality of relationship, quality of being in the world, connection. So what does it mean to connect? And this is a new literacy we're going to have to keep asking. My element is to do it through play because I think a lot of people take these questions and it's very serious and somber and you usually have conversations about well-being and it's either a meditative lull which is great but I want people to get fired up about this and say hey like right now we need to be asking these questions because there's a lot at stake with how how the future is building upon I like that we're talking about the meaning of life on a Friday right here because it's coming fast as as Carly was saying we've lived this in our generation You know, we've seen that. So, yeah. The ultimate sort of existential question, which Roni is referring to and we're all attempting to grapple with, is with every technological step change we've seen in many lifetimes, in many generations, we've actually always seen an increase in labor force, an increase in people doing jobs. Like we could argue now that the way that computers have infiltrated every part of society and every part of the job market and the social market and the media market is that every job is a computer job, like for the most part, except maybe some farmers. But even they use computers in some way, shape or form to check their crops and do all these things. Right. And so you've got billions of people around the world that have now made their jobs because of silicon. Right. now we're entering this age where potentially that last step change has taken us over the edge. I think that's what people are so scared about is this one, as Roni's making the point of, is going to be so powerful that now we've removed all impetus for the human condition to go out and do things because the computers, which we now have billions of people working in that field in some way, shape or form or ancillary touching that field, will actually take over that last step in the equation. And that is what is scary to us. That is, I think, what Pluribus is attempting to show from a visual standpoint in their story. It's a deep, deep scare. So, yeah. Right. So why not, to Roni's point, we have a proposition. I'm just laying this out. I could easily disagree with myself in two minutes, but UBI, UBI for everybody, include, but money is, Didn't Yuval Noah Harari say it's like the greatest story? Like it's just a function. It's just a construct, yeah. Right. What we need is healthcare. We need the infrastructure, healthcare, education, better systems. And then people won't be in a state of fear. So many people are scrambling in a state of fear. I know this sounds utopian and dreamlike, but I think it's to good point. We need to level a little bit and look at something not from a competitive standpoint, because everything that comes down to the tragedy of the commons, then people just don't have trust. So if we have trust-based systems more transparent, then people have the basic of what they need. So they're not scrambling. They can trust in their systems. And we have enough function now to be able to do that. We have enough capital. It just involves people really spelling it out, saying what they stand behind. And we see that shift like in countries like the Nordic countries, extraordinarily high taxation rates. And their goal is to actually do that spread of wealth and give services. Now, you can argue because they're so insular, they can do this more effectively than like the United States or or the EU or other places. But it's an interesting thesis to ask for these giant corporations that make so much money and build these multi-trillion dollar valuations to actually look at a massive give back strategy through a taxation mechanism that's what the let me ask let me ask denmarks do let me ask caitlin one last question on this topic which i hopefully summarize it okay if you look at native american indigenous populations which have hundreds and thousands of years lived in a slightly different kind of world are you looking at like a remix of those societies like not exactly what they were but they weren't like go to work nine to five societies they were there was a culture and music and and running around and having like all sorts of different things were occupying people's time do we need to look at those societies and do a remix for what we need to become and like this kind of work in the factory was like an anomaly in the human condition i think absolutely because it's a great example i think people right now again with that question what makes you come alive. Back to the word amateur, we'll have more time. The word amateur comes from amour, the word love. What do you love to do? This is not people atrophying and their brain rot. This is people, I think, rediscovering what it means to have, you could have pop-up maker culture and digital fab labs and people in these, people have that capacity of forming genuine friendships and it'll have to maybe go back to some type of hybrid state where people learn how to manipulate again with the hands. And that's the new literacy where it's not just having enough in the infrastructure of government and systems, but it's coupled with exactly that, Roni, in my view. And I think amateur is a nice way to look at it. What do you love? Caden, that is a great place for us to wrap up the podcast. We're coming up on the hour. everybody has things to do at nine o'clock let me just uh plug our next two shows we are doing a show the day after christmas our guest is shelly palmer and we'll be reviewing 2025 and i was so hoping you would say our guest is santa claus that's what i was hoping and santa and then and then the following week we have gary shapiro to give us gary shapiro the head of the cta and he's going to give us a preview of what's coming at CES. I'm going to predict a lot of AR-enabled smart glasses, but that's just my beat. Finally, don't forget, if you want to come to the podcast party at CES, Wednesday the 7th, reach out to me on the socials or on my website. Thanks, everybody. That's our show. This, I would say, is the most philosophical episode of our entire art, Caitlin. You get the highest marks for being the most philosophically helping us, guide us through some of the philosophy of what we all discuss week after week. So thank you. Caitlin Krauss, the book is, yes, thank you. And the book is Digital Wellbeing. So pick up a copy. It's got a beautiful cover and I give it my personal recommendation. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next week. Thanks so much. Thank you.