342: Follow The Money: Who’s driving climate disinformation?

00:15:30.460 --> 00:15:31.740

Paul Dickinson: Let's deal with the money here for a minute. I wasn't for a minute suggesting the Coca-Cola company doesn't watch it. It's advertising very carefully. I'm sure they're all trying to avoid this kind of stuff. But essentially, we've got this nightmare partnership, I guess, between brands, which in the nature of things, spend money to promote themselves. We know that has been going on for a long time. You're saying there's crazy different disinformation being made. What is it? Potentially by hostile governments, so we don't even know who's making it and it's driving eyeballs, and the eyeballs are sucking in the adverts. Is that how it works?

00:15:57.800 --> 00:15:58.080

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yeah. The more eyeballs, the more money. Simple as that. So therefore, the more adverts that can be placed on these platforms.

00:16:04.800 --> 00:16:10.020

Paul Dickinson: And the trend is more automation, more platforms. You're worried that things are getting worse.

00:16:11.800 --> 00:16:12.460

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Definitely.

00:16:12.460 --> 00:16:13.440

Paul Dickinson: And since Trump came in, right? Because I believe there's been a rollback.

00:16:15.280 --> 00:16:16.740

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): There has been a rollback, yes. So on meta-platforms, for example, and we have challenged them on this, you can now say without any sort of content moderation that a woman can be a man's property. You can say that the LGBTQ plus community shouldn't exist. And again, really want to make this point about freedom of expression here, because freedom of expression obviously is a human right. It's very much central to the Declaration. So people are free to sort of say what they like within the law. But the critical thing there is they don't have a right to monetize that sort of stuff. And this is the economic model. So this legal but harmful point is the next video, the next video, the next video, that's the point of trying to keep you on there for longer. So there's more advertising in the tree to sell.

00:17:01.660 --> 00:17:07.020

Paul Dickinson: And I mean, there are quite strict rules, particularly in the UK, for example, which I personally don't object to enormously. But they would say that if you were making, you know, particularly an incitement to racial hatred or something like that, then you could be prosecuted anyway. Yes. The motivation, I mean, you could say, well, I'm a racist, this is my motivation. But also it could be that I'm getting followers. Could I personally be monetizing my hate content?

00:17:24.140 --> 00:17:24.700

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yes. How? So we are currently looking into a project on vigilante violence, where extremists are effectively beating up people on the streets. And those videos are both monetized, but also some of those videos have embedded ads for their own channel merch as well, merchandise. So they're making money from the ads and then from selling merch in the platform as well.

00:17:50.840 --> 00:17:53.260

Paul Dickinson: Well, they kind of beat people up merch, literally.

00:17:53.520 --> 00:17:54.360

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Kind of, yeah. It's pretty wild. So that's what, when you say it's getting worse, it got better for a period of time. It really did. And businesses and platforms genuinely work together. But it is now getting worse. And because there's no, not an adequate regulation to drive transparency through the supply chain, like any other supply chain, you know, it has checks and balances and measures to make sure that you're not...

00:18:19.280 --> 00:18:26.600

Paul Dickinson: Well, you know, way back in the day, 20 something years ago, I was walking through a town square and there was complaints against Nike with child labor. And then Nike said, Oh, we don't have any factories. That didn't work for them. And they changed their views pretty hard on that. Well, look, you've mentioned the declaration. And that's what I think we should be really celebrating and focusing on today. Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change. Who is this from? And what is this declaration?

00:18:43.820 --> 00:18:52.540

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): So there is something called the Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change that was launched by President Lula in the G20.

00:18:52.540 --> 00:18:53.280

Paul Dickinson: Sorry, I've got to say it. Leadership of Brazil, carry on.

00:18:55.060 --> 00:18:57.840

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yes, at the G20 last year. So the chairs are the Brazilian government, the United Nations and UNESCO. And then there were seven countries.

00:19:04.460 --> 00:19:06.080

Paul Dickinson: UNESCO is the?

00:19:06.540 --> 00:19:09.560

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Is effectively the cultural arm of the UN. So they cover things like cultural events. They kind of have the Biosphere programs, but also they look very much about protection and safety of journalists as well.

00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:19.800

Paul Dickinson: That's important.

00:19:19.800 --> 00:19:20.680

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Really important.

00:19:20.680 --> 00:19:22.060

Paul Dickinson: I'm here on a press badge today.

00:19:22.060 --> 00:19:28.160

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Well, you'll see in the Declaration as well, you know, the imperative about safety of journalists and scientists as well. So yes, three chairs. And then it was, it started with seven countries. And now there are, I believe, 14 countries, of which 12, I believe, have now signed the Declaration.

00:19:37.680 --> 00:19:45.060

Paul Dickinson: So this Declaration has been signed by Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay. Those are pretty heavy hitting countries.

00:19:46.620 --> 00:19:47.060

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yeah. And it's the first time that this has happened in a COP. This issue hasn't really landed. We went to the Glasgow COP first, and we started to talk to people about climate disinformation, and they sort of blinked at us and went, what? And then actually a couple of years later, we worked with Tom.

00:20:02.960 --> 00:20:04.520

Paul Dickinson: Our very own Tom Rivett-Carnac.

00:20:04.520 --> 00:20:04.960

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yes. And he was on an event with us talking about this issue. So it's really started to gain traction as people get more aware of this issue. It's going to be an issue undermining everything. It undermines all the negotiation. How are you going to negotiate on loss and damage if you don't have a kind of agreed set of facts underneath it? So this issue, I think, is going to be critical, especially for, as Lula put it, the cop of truth.

00:20:26.580 --> 00:20:28.280

Paul Dickinson: How will the Declaration kind of play out? What are the sort of key aspects of the Declaration? How would you like to see it making its way into the world?

00:20:33.900 --> 00:20:36.040

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): I think this is a political declaration. It sets the political will. What, initially, here, we d love to see is that Lula, as I mentioned, started the COP saying this should be the cop of truth. We would like to see the Information Integrity make it into the cover decision, so the outcome of the document, because that would then deliver on this principle of it being a cop of truth. And then there are plenty of sort of, there are quite a few aspects to the Declaration, including things like, I mentioned, safety of journalists, access to data for researchers, because again, the data that researchers have and scientists have on the technology platforms has been reduced. There's a piece, obviously, about advertising in there, so making sure that there are policies and frameworks for transparent advertising, so both advertisers and civil society groups can have access to this massive trillion dollar industry.

00:21:27.380 --> 00:21:29.760

Paul Dickinson: And I mean, look, you've worked on this for a long time. How are you feeling about where we are, and how are you feeling about how the Declaration could, I'm hoping, to use that awful cliché, move the needle?

00:21:40.240 --> 00:21:45.700

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): I used to be a lot more naively optimistic about everything in climate and COPs. I think cautiously optimistic is probably where I would sit with this. I think this is a really good start. I think there's an alignment as well. Like advertisers don't want this stuff happening.

00:21:57.500 --> 00:22:00.860

Paul Dickinson: Kind of undermining that somebody's kind of soiling their industry.

00:22:01.140 --> 00:22:01.960

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yeah, exactly. They want a transparent supply chain. There's one advertiser we were with literally found themselves on 280,000 websites globally. How do you audit that? So they've literally cut it down to a few thousand and guess what? Their return on investment has gone up and their sales have gone up.

00:22:18.460 --> 00:22:18.760

Paul Dickinson: Right. So there's a business case for not causing suicide and climate denial.

00:22:23.260 --> 00:22:24.140

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yes. That's the critical thing. That's this alignment piece because if business can do well by having these transparent supply chain and then governments and civil society groups can do well because this is also about climate, but it's also about democracy, the undermining of our democratic institutions through disinformation as well. So I think the point is, is there's increasing alignment between business, civil society, governments as well, that hopefully, as I said, cautiously optimistic that this can be a start and then move from there. Again, respecting freedom of expression and basic human rights, but this is about taking on a business problem, I think.

00:23:04.040 --> 00:23:21.880

Paul Dickinson: Chris Wright, the new US Energy Secretary, who I think is a very dangerous individual, I've listened to his speeches and he speaks of what appears to be belief himself, that we need more fossil fuels to alleviate considerable poverty and suffering in many parts of the less developed world. Presumably, you wouldn't for a minute suggest he shouldn't be saying things like that. There must be some line where something's crossed. What's that definition of that line?

00:23:32.520 --> 00:23:35.280

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): I mean, that's something we talk about an awful lot. I think the point is you should, in a free country, with respect to freedom of expression, be able to say unpopular things, things that people might be offended by and so on. But I think it is this critical point of you don't have a right to algorithmic promotion of your racism or your climate denial, nor do you have a human right. There's no human right to earn money.

00:23:57.540 --> 00:24:02.040

Paul Dickinson: You're not actually so much talking about what people are saying. You're saying that there are circumstances where people are saying things that may be objectionable, but maybe they've got a right to say it. But your concern is with the manipulation of that by the platforms to raise revenues.

00:24:15.820 --> 00:24:16.160

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yes. Algorithms and the economic model are the two major things.

00:24:20.880 --> 00:24:22.100

Paul Dickinson: But you can't separate the two. There must be... There must be the line that's crossed. I mean, for me personally, spent a quarter of a century working on climate change. For me personally, the public not being persuaded that facts about things aren't facts, that's dangerous.

00:24:36.120 --> 00:24:39.720

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Hugely, hugely dangerous for all of us. How do we come together and solve some of the world's biggest problems if we're not on a basis of factual information? It is really obviously hugely important to protect freedom of expression. The other thing that is really interesting, the UK have put in process this Online Safety Act. Actually, there's nothing in it that will then go and arrest people for breaking that. It's actually other laws. Already, we have laws against incitement to violence and so on. It's actually other laws that we currently have, so it's not even tech policy.

00:25:14.600 --> 00:25:19.720

Paul Dickinson: Often, I think it's a case that law needs to catch up with changes in technology. It's just that when so-and-so was framed, there weren't weirdly smart algorithms bidding across 300,000 websites for tiny slices of... Yeah.

00:25:31.760 --> 00:25:32.320

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Exactly.

00:25:32.320 --> 00:25:32.860

Paul Dickinson: Totally get it. Exactly. Update our laws to meet our updated technology.

00:25:35.860 --> 00:25:36.640

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yes.

00:25:36.640 --> 00:25:37.740

Paul Dickinson: Makes perfect sense. Look, thank you so much for this, Jake. You're an inspiration and I think you've nailed the critical foundational issue that's been undermining everything, the hole in the bottom of the ship. People are thinking the climate change ship is sinking, and you're like, well, there's a big hole here, right? Just give me a little bit about fossil fuel advertising today, just as it appears. I mean, you would have seen adverts around here. What does that bring up for you?

00:26:00.700 --> 00:26:05.620

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Again, it's an opaque industry, but the scale of it again is massive. Just sponsorship is over five billion and it's bought sponsorship. Shell had a brief on $240 million globally, just on media buying. The media buying is done where policy makers are. If you've ever walked through Westminster, there'll be fossil fuel ads, defense ads and so on. But same when we launched this global initiative in Rio. The ads all around the G20 were Shell ads. Then we've seen a lot of what is publicly and maybe less publicly available, a lot of information that these fossil fuel companies are direct. Their audience is not to convince the man or woman on the street to put petrol from Shell or BP, is their audience is policy makers. We've got the International Gas Union said, they're targeting policy makers. Equinor have said in a response to the ASA on an ad that was banned to say, well, no, we're not targeting people, we're targeting policy makers. You're like, it's social license.

00:27:05.640 --> 00:27:08.540

Paul Dickinson: So policy makers are presumably people, but what do I know?

00:27:08.540 --> 00:27:09.540

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yeah, well, exactly. But they're trying to maintain their social license, and that's the play. You can, what's called geo-fence digital advertising. So you can set effectively a digital fence around events, as well as the physical stuff, the out of home stuff, the billboards. You can say, well, I'm going to just advertise around Bellem on digital platforms, and that's then the ads that you'll see if you pick up your phone and open a social media app or search on Google. So it's very deliberate, very targeted, sophisticated technology, but it creates that surround sound, right? We call it lobbytizing. There's the lobbying itself and the PR campaigns. I mean, Edelman are the kind of agency that are working here with the COP presidency, and they have lots of fossil fuel clients, right? But also that surround sound that if policy makers, where they are physically and where they are digitally, fossil fuel companies want to promote the fact that they are working for the future.

00:28:07.960 --> 00:28:10.640

Paul Dickinson: And what about AI? James Lovelock, who came up with Gaia Theory, this amazing scientist, wrote a book called Novosene, The Coming Era of Hyperintelligence. In the book blurb on the MIT website, it says, these new creatures will think at 10,000 times the speed of humans and will look at us the way we look at plants. How are those machines that we are or have our minds blown by each day? I've got to tell you, every time I do a search on an AI, and it comes up with this incredible thing in one second, I'm like, what is going on? How are those machines showing up in this area?

00:28:38.860 --> 00:28:41.780

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): I mean, they're obviously incredible, incredibly powerful. They are being adopted in this area. In an advertising space, I was talking to the CEO of GWEC, and he was saying that there was AI generated images of dead whales on beaches in America, saying that wind turbines were killing whales. This was before they built anything offshore. And then that spread all over the world. So there's the content problem, but also there's the opacity problem again. But the attention economy that I talked about earlier is also coming to these large language models. So effectively, OpenAI, who owned Chachi BT, are hiring monetization people. So therefore the incentive suddenly becomes, well, you know, serving you an answer. Well, they want to serve you more and more answers that may or may not have Information Integrity baked in. But if you're again on that large language model for longer, again, more ads can be served to you. I guess the other problem with, you know, this issue is the death of the open web in so far that if you're searching now on Chachi BT, as opposed to, say, Google, you're there. So you're not going off to special interest media and journalism. And also now the Google AI Overviews are taking the real estate. It used to be a search engine. Seems like it's more like an answers engine. And that's critically affecting the number of people going to journalism. And if we can't protect journalism, then, you know, how are we going to protect information integrity? So the owner of Rolling Stone is suing Google for abuse of monopoly in the last few weeks. And then I guess the final thing to say is that these large language models use so much carbon and so much water that, you said, MIT, on the MIT website, there was something where the predicted energy use for just on AI for data centers is predicted to be the equivalent of 22% of American households by 2028. So the energy use is going to go through the roof as well, which ain't going to be good for an American NDC if we ever see one again.

00:30:41.060 --> 00:30:41.400

Paul Dickinson: Yeah. Well, don't start us on the poor Great Republic right in the middle of its misery at the moment. Perhaps caused in no small measure by polarization driven by, what did you call it? Monetization of disinformation.

00:30:53.480 --> 00:30:54.180

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yeah, exactly. Monetization of legal but harmful. This podcast is Outrage and Optimism. It's monetizing outrage because if outrage keeps you there for longer and makes you watch another video, more money can be made.

00:31:08.100 --> 00:31:12.300

Paul Dickinson: I'm going to cross my fingers and wish for monetizing optimism. Can I ask you a sort of outrage and an optimism, so something that's most drives you crazy now and one dream you've got?

00:31:22.960 --> 00:31:37.680

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): I think outrage, we've kind of talked about it, the manipulation of a combination of fossil fuel advertising and big tech converging, I think, and I think the outrage also is you talked about lack of regulation. AI is coming at us like a train. The legislative and regulatory guidelines around AI are just not there. I think we're going to make the same mistake that we made with social media platforms or advertising companies, as I like to call them, as we will with AI. So that is something that I am currently outraged about. The optimism part, I mean, we're at COP, I think this is a hugely optimistic COP from the point of view of bringing everybody together. This has been, I went to the protest this morning. It was wonderful. You know, it was...

00:32:12.220 --> 00:32:15.060

Paul Dickinson: Brazil also doing really great protests, right? Tell us about it.

00:32:16.060 --> 00:32:17.460

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): It was incredibly emotional. It was so many groups from different walks of life coming together to demand action. These people are on the front lines of climate change, as are, by the way, we all. There's a storm in the UK at the moment. You know, this is not just a kind of somewhere else, but you know, this is groups in Brazil coming together. It was massive. Lots of groups, lots of indigenous communities coming together. But I burst into tears at one point because it was so powerful and kind of emotional.

00:32:43.060 --> 00:32:45.300

Paul Dickinson: They were doing the same at demonstrations.

00:32:45.300 --> 00:32:46.680

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Yeah, it was very powerful. And there was a brilliant sort of funeral for fossil fuels as well. There were sort of big coffins for oil, gas and coal. And it was just very clever sort of stunt, I guess. But the optimism of it still that hopefully with human beings coming together without all of this weird vested interests that seems to be skewed by money will hopefully finally get us there.

00:33:12.840 --> 00:33:14.740

Paul Dickinson: Jake Dubbins, thank you so much for joining us. Really appreciate this conversation, your inspiring work. And go Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change.

00:33:20.240 --> 00:33:23.680

Jake Dubbins (guest, Conscious Advertising Network): Thanks Paul, lovely to be here.

00:33:23.680 --> 00:33:25.840

Paul Dickinson: So friends, what did you make of that?

00:33:25.860 --> 00:33:34.340

Christiana Figueres: One thing that worries me about this whole issue is the attack on trust. Because disinformation leads us to distrusting science. Can you believe that we've reached that point? Distrusting media and journalism, as we have seen in the past few years, the attacks on journalists, distrusting institutions, distrusting even democracy and our exercise of democracy, and fundamentally distrusting each other, so that we now walk through the world greeting people with a question mark in front of our face. Can I trust this person? Can I trust what they say? I mean, it has just been such a pull of the rug from under us, from being able to operate, think and act out of a general sense of, well, yes, we can believe in all of this and we can act on it. Now, it's like, whatever anybody says, whatever we read has a big question mark on it. How did we get to that point? How are we questioning science?

00:34:48.400 --> 00:34:49.140

Tom Rivett-Carnac: It's interesting, isn't it? It made me think of this OECD report that came out a while ago that I'm sure you saw we'll put in the show notes on disinformation and misinformation, which actually points out that even if somebody knows that something is untrue, it still contributes to discord and a lack of coherence on a shared objective. I thought it was a great interview, Paul, and I think a few different things that stood out for me. He talks about this kind of legal but harmful content that's now being monetized at real scale. And actually, there's so much now as we get the kind of information and attention economy scaling up. Exactly to Christiana's point, it's so atomized in the interests of the various different players who are putting real money into this, that the net effect of that to society is we have no shared basis of agreement on anything. And we're experiencing that in climate. But you don't have a shared basis of agreement. You can't do any big things. All you can do is small things that get, small little winds that get worked on around the side. So I think this is really at the core of many of the challenges we're facing. And climate is just one manifestation. I think it's really interesting that climate disinformation spikes during extreme weather. That actually, that's a moment of knowledge that there's vulnerability there. That actually, extreme weather could lead to a sense of unity and-

00:36:06.500 --> 00:36:07.320

Paul Dickinson: Should lead. Should lead.

00:36:08.820 --> 00:36:09.940

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Should naturally lead. And there is a deliberate attempt. And God, I'd love to know exactly where it's coming from and have some witness inside the rooms where people are actually deliberately constructing these disinformation campaigns to prevent that unity from emerging. So that's a real source of outrage that is going on. That we're people that aren't consciously aware of that we're being manipulated in that way. I do think, notwithstanding my tongue in cheek comments earlier, that this declaration on information integrity on climate change is potentially a really interesting political breakthrough that gets people to focus on what many of the challenges are. I confess to not quite seeing my way from that declaration to sort of like sorting out this murky world. And that's no criticism of the declaration. It's such a multifaceted problem. And UN processes and declarations are by their very nature so difficult to implement when you get to something so complicated. I think it would be interesting to keep looking at this. And I also think the comments about or an observation that the solution here clearly isn't censoring speech. It's not about telling people what they can and can't say. It's about the algorithms, it's about the monetization, it's about this integration of sectional commercial interests with the ability to just have a massive megaphone. And we all suffer as a result.

00:37:27.240 --> 00:37:38.160

Paul Dickinson: Although there is speech, you can't, we have to live in free speech, and I can probably stand in the street and hand out leaflets saying, you should vote for the Green Party, or you should vote for Raj or something. But I can't hand out leaflets in a theater saying there's a fire when there isn't. There are limits to what you can reasonably do.

00:37:46.040 --> 00:37:48.440

Christiana Figueres: But how do you establish those limits, Paul? Because that's a limit for you. But it may not be a limit for other people.

00:37:54.720 --> 00:37:57.200

Paul Dickinson: You can't put a swastika flag up in Germany. It's against the law. They made that law. So the government can have a role. But you're right. When Trump came in this time around, second Trump term, there was a kind of general move to remove all kind of controls from social media. Being anti-woke actually meant you could just open the sewers of information and no one does anything about it anymore. When you talk to them about people spending resources to try and combat the response to extreme weather, I mean, God help those people if they ever end up in court. I know that any of us would testify, unfortunately, against them, that they acted supremely irresponsibly. And we have quite strict laws in the UK about what you can and can't say. And I personally am pretty supportive of them. Because of this idea, if you go back to George Orwell, his central thesis was 2 plus 2 equals 4. And the government in that particularly insightful book tries to persuade you that 2 plus 2 equals 5, because they know if they can do that, they can do anything. Vladimir Putin was advised by a theatre director who said, you know, okay, what you should do is you should fund the extreme left and you should fund the extreme right and you should fund the crazy people and you should tell everyone you're funding everyone. So there's no trust, there's no bedrock, no one knows what's going on. And so just a kind of concluding thought for me is, should really, fossil fuel advertising be allowed? And I would focus particularly on cigarettes here, because we've clearly come to the conclusion that cigarette advertising must not be allowed and is not allowed and has been banned for many, many years. And if you want a crazy experience one day and you're walking through duty free in an airport, go into the tragic little cigarette corner, where there's just photos of ghastly wounds and diseases caused by cigarettes on hundreds of packets. It's like, so we've got there with cigarettes. And the question is, when might we get there with similarly or even more damaging products?

00:39:43.220 --> 00:39:44.240

Christiana Figueres: Much more damaging.

00:39:44.700 --> 00:39:45.500

Tom Rivett-Carnac: I totally take your point. I think the fossil fuel advertising thing is a really interesting question that actually merits quite a bit of time to unpick the merits and the demerits one side or the other. I'm just struck also, you know, because the comments you made about government mandates, you know, George Orwell, Nazi Germany, you know, the government control. We're not in that situation, right? We're in a kind of banality of evil situation where lots of people are pursuing sectional interests and we have a crisis of communications that is leading to a crisis of confidence in shared truths like science and democracy and other things. And nobody's kind of, there might be some individuals in the fossil fuel industry who are kind of deliberately fomenting that. But in general, the problem is it's coming from lots of different places at once and the noise is really hard to deal with. That the noise is everywhere, you don't know what to believe, the Russian bots, the fossil fuel lobbying, all these other different things. So there are big issues here that I think it would merit us to, it would be helpful to the world to kind of unpick a bit and think really what are the pathways and solutions, because it would be ridiculous if we didn't deal with climate change because we kind of couldn't sort out the media landscape and say therefore just couldn't work out what to do.

00:40:54.100 --> 00:41:04.180

Christiana Figueres: And to that, Tom, I would add that the challenge here is the depth of the understanding of what human psychology is and how we react. So the fact that they have understood that they can stoke fear in us and that that will overtake reason because it does, because that's what our amygdala does. The fact that they can stoke outrage, outrage of the negative kind over curiosity, the fact that they can stoke lies and inventions over truth, the fact that they can stoke confirmation bias over thoughtful reflection. I mean, it does take much more effort to get us to reason, inquire, investigate, reflect, rather than just react to fear or confirmation bias or hatred or polarization or whatever. It does take more effort because our human psychology has been solidified in thousands of years from the time of our ancestors when we did have a real reason to fear and we're still in that. So they are exploiting that. They're exploiting the bottom, the roots of human fear that go thousands of years back and that we're just barely beginning to understand and get out of.

00:42:36.720 --> 00:42:40.240

Paul Dickinson: But can I just separate up the they there because there could well be two parties here. You could have happy foods or happy soaps, nice companies spending money on social media advertising. They're funding it. And then there's kind of evil bot farms and evil people taking you down these scary directions you've just been describing, Christiana. And it's a really unfortunate combination of the sometimes innocent companies with innocent advertising budgets that are being kind of abused by this fight or flight reflex. So, yeah, let's come back to this topic because it's huge, because we're not going to be able to win a debate when we can't have one because people are, minds are being bent.

00:43:15.860 --> 00:43:16.800

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Yeah. Okay. So, I mean, clearly there's lots of solutions and challenges here. I mean, the role of the platforms, what should be done there, the role of government, the role of NGOs and others to hold people to account, the role of scientists. Thank you for raising this, Paul. I thought it was a fascinating interview. I'm a big fan of Jake. I've done various things with him over the years. So I thought this was really helpful. And listeners, please do get in touch if you have views about this. We're really keen to hear about it. And we're developing our own understanding for a more in-depth analysis of it next year. So do reach out. And thanks for listening this week. See you next week.

00:43:44.860 --> 00:43:45.320

Christiana Figueres: Bye.

00:43:45.320 --> 00:43:45.460

Tom Rivett-Carnac: Bye.