Hello, and welcome to Western CIV. In this bonus author interview, I
sit down with historian Tom Wheeler and we talk about his most recent book,
Techlash, Who Makes the Rules in the Digital guilded Age link in the show
notes if you want to take a look at picking up a copy of it.
I think it's a great book, not just for history buffs in this
particular case. Of course, history buffs are going to love it because it
talks about the guilded Age, but it's also an interesting book if you're just
interested in modern public policy, or if you're just kind of curious about,
hey, what is AI and what is the government going to do about it?
And I think one of the things that Tom and I come back to
again is there's a lot of parallels between the past and the present, especially
if you look at the rate of industrialized industrializing. I suppose technological change in
the Gilded Age, so late nineteenth early twentieth century, and then the pace
of change driven by superconductors and computers today, Like, it's the same in
a lot of different ways, and how we react to it can do a
lot and can say a lot about us as a society. So it's a
there's a good interview. I originally hope you enjoy it. It's a wonderful
book. Pick up. A copy link is in the show notes. And
so therefore, without further ado, here's the interview. Okay, as I
mentioned moments ago, I'm sitting down with his story and Tom Wheeler talking about
his most recent book, tech Lash, Who makes the Rules in the Digital
guilded Age. Well, first of all, thanks for using the word guilded
Age, because it's one of those things that when I talk to students,
their eyes just glaze over. But it's a really interesting period for me,
and I love the connections to the modern day, and I actually think that
there are a ton of parallels between the Guilded Age and the period that we
find ourselves in right now, which is kind of what we're going to get
into. But as you write in the introduction, and I hear this in
different phrases everywhere, but I think it's really apt here. History doesn't necessarily
repeat itself, but it certainly has consistent themes, and so kind of broadly,
just kind of starting out, like, how does the Gilded Age relate
to the age that we find ourselves in? Because trains and electricity seem the
thing of the distant past. Well, first of all, Adam, thank
you very much for inviting me, and it's a great pleasure to be with
you and your listeners today. You know, you were talking about guilded and
the Gilded Age and then talking about how today echoes that. You know,
it was Mark Twain who who created the term the Gilded Age, and he
also had that great observation that history doesn't repeat itself, but it sometimes rhymes.
And I think that's what we're dealing with right now. You know,
let's look at the similarities between today and the Gilded Age, which was the
late nineteenth early twentieth century. You've got new technology driving change. You've got
new economic models resulting new products, lower prices for many products. You've got
the acceleration of life. You know, we never stop and think about back
in the nineteen hundreds, how everybody was rebelling against how fast life had all
of a sudden become. We've got the destruction of small businesses, the creation
of monopolies, huge wealth disparities resulting consumer harm, and even fake news.
So the key thing I think, and what I was trying to talk about
in techlash is to look behind the whys for both the original Gilded Age and
the digital Gilded Age and try and assess why it happened then, why it's
happening now, what they did about it, and what that suggests for us.
And I think that the whys are first of all, that in both
instances it's technology driven. What changed life in the Gilded Age was the railroad,
which was the first high speed network, then immediately followed by the telegraph,
which was the first electronic network, and that then changed or created the
Industrial Revolution and created opportunities for visionary entrepreneurs and their investors to create the new
rules that would govern that new economy, acting kind of as pseudo governments.
And you know, that's a very similar situation what we have today, a
group of entrepreneurs and their investors driving change and acting like pseudo governments. Just
to drill down on the change for a moment, I think it's art for
us, certainly hard for my students to understand how novel over the course of
total human history, this pace of change is nowadays. If you took a
let's just say, peasant farmer in Gaul around the time of Julius Caesar and
then you jump forward to the Frankish Empire under Charlemagne roughly a thousand years eight
hundred years later. Their lives are probably fairly comparable. They honestly are.
There's still subsistence farming. Yeah, there's been a change as to who they
pay their taxes to, but you know, they'd never really cared about that
in the first place, and so it's there. Just wasn't change. Life
was very static for a long period of time, and then really starting with
the Gilded Age, things explode and the pace of change becomes almost exponential,
and that's something that draws VI obviously the opportunities for growth, but I mean,
correct me if I'm wrong. It definitely drives the opportunities for conflict as
well, certainly societal conflict. When you take a society that hadn't changed for
such a long period of time and then due to technology, you force it
to go through those changes. I don't know, what do you think about
that? No, I think it's a really good point that the you know,
there was even a scholarly paper in one of the medical journals of the
time that talked about the effect of the change in the pace of life on
human behavior and human human psychology. And they blamed it on the railroad,
the steam printing press, and the telegraphs, as well as the increasing rights
of women. But it was a it was in a medical journal and accepted
at the time. You know, I think your point about, you know,
looking back into medieval times and how things really didn't change and comparing it
to first of the original guilded Age and then todday. Let me just give
you an example between today and the original guilded Age. So in the midst
of the original guilded Age, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. It took
one hundred and twenty five years before the telephone connected one billion people around the
world. The Android mobile operating system, which we all see in smartphones,
the Android mobile operating system, the equivalent, if you will, communications backbone
of the twenty first century, took less than six years to reach that same
point. That is speed, that is change coming at you at exponential speed.
And I think that that's interesting. It's that exponential thing that that makes
a big difference. Another thing that I always like to point out to students
is that it takes and really I think in the guilded Age. This get
starts to get cemented into place that we as humans, we finally start to
become forward looking. Forever humans were backward looking. And I mean that in
terms of science too. You know, the idea that really tell the scientific
revolution that to learn about the world around you, it wasn't to experiment,
It wasn't to go out and look at things. It was to read Aristotle,
it was to read Plato, it was to go back. Always had
to go back, go back, go back. Even the founding fathers in
the United States when they're trying to come up with, you know, names
for what are we going to have a Senate, Well, they didn't pull
that out of a hat. You know, that comes directly from Republican rome
that they're trying to I mean like, let's go back, let's figure out
how to do this, and finally, in the Gilded Age and in our
modern era, we start to look forward firmly for the first time. And
I think that's a big change. I'm really interested in mindsets really, to
be honest with you. I think you take a Roman citizen, you pull
them, you get the you know, the delorea and the flux capacitor,
and you go back in time and you grab him and you bring him up.
I think he gets used to the technology faster than he gets used to
the way that we look at the world now, the way that we view
the world. I think that takes a longer time for him. But when
we're talking about these inventions, like I like the idea the book of sort
of like some inventions are just naturally catalysts for other inventions. You think of
them as like explosions that sets off explosions, that sets off explosion over here
and over there, Like, what are some examples of that, because I
really think of that. In the Gilded Age, we see that really for
the first time. Well, let me go back and just expand on that
point a little bit. Adam, it is never the primary technology that is
transformational, but it's secondary effect. You know, it wasn't you know,
you want to go back and way back in history. Gutenberg's press spread information
and knowledge, but it's real result, there's real transformation. Was what the
effect of that was a little thing called the Reformation, you know, the
Renaissance, the development of the scientific method. You look at the railroad in
the in the Gilded Age, the railroad was the death of distance. You
know, it had from time immemorial, it had been geography and physical barriers
that determined the breadth of the of economic activity, and the railroad changed all
of that. And then right on the heels of the railroad comes the telegraph,
which was, you know, the end of time as a as a
determining factor. And so what we're looking at in in both revolutions is we
need to make sure that we're looking we're not focusing on the technology per se,
but we're focusing on what its effects are. And if I can just
jump forward a bit, that's the issue dealing with artificial intelligence today. You
know, it's not artificial intelligence qua artificial intelligence that is the issue. It
is what is going to be the effects of artificial intelligence, and our challenge
as a species and the challenge of policy making. Since I spent a good
deal of my life working on federal policies, the challenge of both the species
and particular the subset of species that are involved in policy is the tendency to
define tomorrow by what we understood yesterday. You know, I was sitting with
the late Madeline Albright one time and we were having a discussion of the former
Secretary of State, and we were having a discussion about the impact of technology
on diplomacy, and she said, you know, the problem is with diplomacy
is that we take twenty first century solutions, define them in twentieth century terms,
and propose nineteenth century solutions. I said, Madam Secretary, I'm stealing
that line because that is the reality that we're dealing with in the technology world
as well. We we define twenty first century problems with twentieth century terms and
proposed nineteenth century solutions. And so what I was suggesting in Techlash was that
we need to think about new solutions that reflect the new realities of the twenty
first century, of the digital Gilded Age. Yeah. I think that's a
really good point, and I want to come back to the policy in just
a second. But also for the listeners, you said something, you know,
the train was the death of distance, and I want to drill into
that just a little bit more. And the reason is because sometimes students will
ask me, well, why aren't there Robert Barns prior to this age?
Why aren't there Rockefellers, you know, why aren't there Carnegies? Why aren't
there any of these people? And I often explain like, well, if
you have a factory, but you don't have railroads, and I make shirts,
it's very difficult for me to sell those shirts hundreds of miles away.
I can sell them locally, right, but it's very difficult for me to
do that. And you call these networks in the book, how these different
sort of technology networks sort of spur and other innovations and drive things. I
wonder if you could drill down on that for a second, because I thought
that part of the book was really interesting. Well, thank you, Adam.
Yeah, I mean, I'm a network guy. I've spent my professional
career in the evolution of new networks and have come to the conclusion that we
are as we connect, that it is our networks that define our commerce as
well as our culture. And let me just let me give you an example.
So Chicago became the second city in the United States because it was a
railroad hub during the nineteenth century, and the first railroad line out of Chicago
connected it with the Mississippi River at Alina, Illinois, and it was creatively
called the Chicago and Galina Railroad. On its first run, the ceremonial run,
where the investors were all pumped up and riding along. This is so
exciting. A farmer comes up and says, hey, I got a wagon
of bags of wheat here, can you take them into Chicago rather than me
having to haul them all the way in there. And so the railroad created
the Industrial Revolution by enabling the centralization of production that used to have to be
close to the output of the raw materials. So you could move coal and
steal to Pittsburgh. You could move raw agricultural products to Chicago, where the
great slaughterhouses then grow up. And so networks are at the core of everything.
And what's been interesting in recent times is that the networks of the nineteenth
and twentieth century were centralizing networks. You know, think about railroads going to
a switching yard where cars were then set on to another line going to another
point. At that centralization point, businesses developed. You know, you had
that that was where That was why Chicago became second city, and all the
abertuis to to slaughter animals located, all the refineries for grain products were located.
And that's the way networks worked for most of the nine the nineteenth and
most of the twentieth century. And then along came this thing called the Internet,
which, instead of doing its network activity at central points, distributed it
and put it out into smaller and smaller hubs where the act where the switching
activity occurred. And that Internet protocol, if you will, change the nature
of economic and individual activity in the late twentieth and early twenty first century to
push it outward. And that's what we're trying to deal with. Now.
How do we exist in how do we make the rules for an economy and
a society that has been operating on assumptions built around centralized activity in an era
of distributed economic and individual activity. And that's the challenge that I try to
address in tech lash. And you know, I would be remiss if I
didn't point this out. As somebody who's from originally from Milwaukee, you know
that Milwaukee was a larger city than Chicago until that's hammered into you as a
school child up. Also, you know that the Pestigo River fire was more
important than the Chicago fire, which is a dubious claim at best, but
well we'll cling to it. Well while we're having fun. While we're having
fun here for a second, Adam, The really interesting thing is that as
the railroads were going west from the east. The Chicago city fathers noticed they
were going to get bypassed, and so they illegally went out and built a
line into Chicago to create the economic activity in Chicago. But they were at
that point in time states had to grant charters for railroads. They said,
the hell of that, We're going to go ahead and build this even without
a state charter. Yeah, that's super interesting. That's super interesting because you
know, the other things that railroads of course allow you to do is maybe
for the first time in human history, you can have a major city that's
not by a body of water for the first time. If you want to,
if you go look at a map, guys, prior to the let's
say it's the early eighteenth century, like, there are no cities that are
not by major bodies of water. And whether that's a river, of major
lake, or the ocean, that's just how it is. Because you couldn't
move goods any other way. Suddenly with the railroad you can move things.
So you talk about in the book, and you kind of started to discuss
this a little bit, But I'm interested in this idea of industrialization versus de
industrialization because you know, we talk about that oftentimes in schools as the move
from a secondary economy to tertiary economy, so, you know, an industrialized
economy to something that's information based, service based, which can mean a lot
of things. People think it's sometimes it's just restaurants. Service industry is a
lot more than that, but it's I wonder if you could talk about some
of the factors that are at play in that, especially especially the move to
a de industrialized economy, because I think then we can kind of talk a
little bit about some of the growing pains Western societies have experienced in recent decades.
Sure, so, I have a chapter in Techlash entitled this is Not
in Capital Letters the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The World Economic Forum has popularized that
concept, and my concern is that it misconstrues what is going on today as
a continuation of industrial habits rather than a seismic shift, and in so doing
it it starts us off on the wrong foot to how do we deal with
these issues? But let me just give you a couple of a couple of
examples. Start with the assets of the twenty first century compared to the assets
of the industrial era. Industrial era assets were things you could stub your toe
on right. Digital assets and the capital asset of the twenty first century is
digital information. Digital assets are soft, there's there's zeros and ones you can
ly you can hardly find them, let alone stub your toe on them.
But they also behave very differently. Industrial assets were exhaustible. You use that
ton of coal and it was gone. Digital assets are inexhaustible. You reuse
the lines of code again and again and again. Industrial assets were expensive.
Digital assets are inexpensive and are and approach zero cost on a marginal basis.
Industrial assets were a use once kind of activity that that you know, if
I burn that ton of coal, it's gone forever. A digital file if
I well, if I if I subscribe to Facebook, Adam, I'm using
the same digital files that you use and they and there's another action here that
if I had a ton of coal, you didn't have a ton of coal.
Uh. The economists call that rivalrous assets and digital assets are non rivalrous
in that you and I can both share the same code for Facebook or the
same word uh, document preparation in our Microsoft Uh the software And and then
and then lastly, is that the really interesting thing about about digital assets.
This different from industrial assets is that they're iterative. When you use a digital
asset, you create digital information, which then itself can be used either to
improve the product or to create a new product. You know, before I
became chairman of the fc SEE, I was a partner in a venture capital
firm and our focus was investing in Internet protocol based services because of the fact
that they were iterative. It was not just what they did, but it
was the data they threw off that created value. And those things together mean
that the economy behaves differently. In the industrial era, it was scope and
scale economies that industrialization brought. I mean, the difference between a couple of
blacksmiths producing a plow and a plow being produced in a factory setting was huge
in the amount of time invested and therefore the cost to the consumer. It
brought to scale things that weren't at scale. Digital moves beyond that kind of
linear growth to literally exponential growth where everything adds on everything else, and that
changes the way businesses operate. That changes the way we interface with the technology
and with each other. So one of the messages in techlash is that is
that we need to cleave we need to get away from defining what's happening today
as though it is an extension of the Industrial Revolution. I mean, it's
a great point. I certainly hope that people read the book, but also
can look at this scenario and recognize that what we have here is a break.
It's not a continuation for all the reasons that you point out and for
many others. But I want to kind of think about, all, right,
what maybe lessons are there from the guilded Age if we start to think
about some of the problems that are facing society right now, which is I
mean, let's just think about maybe two, maybe misinformation, right which is
a big I mean, it's in the media all the time, people are
talking about it. How do we deal with misinformation? Well, they have
that in the Guilded Age too, so maybe there's a lesson there. And
then how do you just deal with this level of sort of decisive change.
And I mean that from the perspective of it's a totally different skill set that
we need people to have than we needed them to have in say, nineteen
fifty. It's totally different. So how do we start to reorient society in
a way to address some of those problems. I don't know if there's any
lessons from the past about that. So I think you have hit the nail
on the head, Adam, with the with the challenge that we're looking in
the Gilded Age. In the original Guilded Age, they were confronting never before
seen challenges. I mean, remember what what what the Gilded Age replaced,
which was an agrarian, an artisan kind of economy, And all of a
sudden you had people being pulled off the farms and brought to major cities that
were where not only were they then working in factories to produce again at scale,
but they were creating all kinds of problems that color epidemics would break out
because there wasn't any good sanitation. We've I ever had that many people living
together before. How do we deal with that? Fires became a real issue,
how do we deal with that? How do we deal with education on
a mass scale? So what happened in the original Gilded Age was a never
before set scene of challenges that society responded to with never before seen solutions.
And that's what we That's the kind of thinking that I hope comes out of
techlash that we are today seeing never before seen challenges and we need to have
never before seen thinking. But now to your point about about fake news for
instance, and back to our friend mister Twain, there are echoes because in
the Gilded Age, the publishers taking advantage of this new technology called the steam
printing press, which allowed them to produce thick newspapers full of advertisements and room
for plenty of information. Guys like William Randolph Hurst and Joseph Pulitzer took the
attitude, hey, as long as it sells papers, who cares if it's
true or not. And it was one of the great periods of fake news.
And in nineteen twenty two a group of newspaper editors working for these guys
organize the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and in nineteen twenty three they came
out with a code of ethics. The first item in the code was tell
the truth is a fantastic story where these individuals literally bit the hand that fed
them in order to push for truth and balance. And you know, if
you go back and you think about what are the things that are dangerous about
the Internet today, and it's spread of wise hate, misinformation, it's exactly
the same economic model it is, Hey, here is to attract a lot
of people to the site so they can see advertising, and so we will
curate the content for outrage rather than veracity. The trouble is that that curation
is now done by algorithm, and then, unlike the editors of the nineteen
twenties, algorithms have no moral compass. And so the challenge becomes, how
do we as a society collectively step in and say no, we think there
needs to be some kind of a code. And again, one of the
things that I propose as a structure whereby that could be accomplished in government.
And that's what I was going to ask you, because I mean, yes,
thinking kind of back to our I mean not so distant mirror here of
the guilded age because it's not that far, but certainly not the scope of
things. But yeah, I mean that's great. Newspaper editors came together and
came up with a code of ethics. I don't see. I don't see
Elon Musk, you know, owner of I guess it's called X now I
still call it Twitter, but whatever. I don't see him leading the charge
to create a code of ethics for things that are posted online and it's changed
in that. Yeah. I mean, you could go out and start your
own newspaper a long time ago, no one's going to read it. Nowadays
you could set up a YouTube channel or a podcast in five seconds. Who's
monitoring you? You know? Is this at the end of the day.
Is this going to have to come from government? I guess is my question.
Like, I just don't know. I don't see a way out other
than that as to who's going to step in. I don't know that we
can trust the businesses to do it. So the front end in the back
end, I think, are governmental where there needs to be an impetus to
come up with the equivalent of that nineteen twenty three publishers code, editors code,
and there needs to be enforcement. So at the front end and the
back end, there's a role for government. Government can say we need to
bring in the middle. Then is a multi stakeholder group. One of the
things that we need to learn in the new digital Gilded Age is that the
way in which government behaved in the original Gilded Age, the industrial era doesn't
work today because it was so micromanaging and overcontrolling, and that has an impact
on the innovation and investment that you want to encourage today. But the structure,
so I came out of the wireless industry, and you know how did
we get from one G, two G, A three G, A four
G, a five G, and now six G is being worked on.
It was the companies coming together to establish technical standards. Let's make sure that
this will work across all devices, no matter who makes them, that it'll
work in all countries, and that it'll work on all networks. That was
a multi stakeholder process where the device manufacturers, the network operators, the equipment
network equipment manufacturers all got together and said this is how we will agree to
operate. It seems to me that we can take that same kind of establishment
of a technical code, if you will, and use it to develop a
behavioral code. But you need the front end of government saying we've had enough.
You guys need to come together and resolve this. We're going to check
it to make sure that it's not just you know, pretty pictures, and
then there'll be an enforcement mechanism. But we need But I go back to
the point that because we're facing never foreseen challenges, we've got to have never
foreseen solutions and I couldn't agree with you more. And I want to be
optimistic. I do. I'm an optimistic person in general. But at the
same token, Tom, as you and I are sitting here having this conversation,
there is no speaker of the House of Representatives, and there has not
been for some time. And I wonder, I think to myself, well,
could a digital regulation survive a filibuster infested Senate. I'm not sure.
I just I want to be optimistic about governmently the way. I just wonder
if we're to that point yet where that can happen. Let's go back in
history again, Adam. Let's go back in history. It was the late
nineteenth century. So the first federal regulatory agency, the Interstate Commerce Commission,
was created in eighteen eighty seven. The Sherman Anti Trust Act was passed in
eighteen ninety. The Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in nineteen oh six.
The Federal Trade Commission Act was passed in nineteen fourteen. The Clayton Anti
Trust Act was passed in nineteen fourteen. Remember those classic pictures that you saw
in school and you're probably still using in class of the big, fat cat
moneyed barons behind the rows of the United States Senate, and these rules were
passed. These laws were passed at a time when corruption was rampant in the
Congress of the United States. Literally cash was exchanged freely. You didn't vote
against the railroads because the railroads gave you free tickets. And you know what,
Adam, despite that kind of dysfunction, we the people. It was
a combination by the way of both populists and progressives who said, hey,
we've had enough and I want to believe that we the people again can express
ourselves. And it's not going to be a overnight thing. It's not going
to be a smooth thing. It's not going to be perfect from the start.
I do agree with you, by the way, at the end of
the day, I think that what the United States has shown us is I
mean, we went through a civil war and we survived a civil war.
So when people say things have never been this bad in this country, like,
well, we did fight a civil war. But I think that there
is a way out. Just because I don't see it yet doesn't mean that
it's not going to form. But what I agree with you completely from this
talk today is that new problems do require new solutions. The notion that we're
going to look back to the past and find a way out of this is
silly, especially based off of the pace of change. One other I want
to ask you this question, and this is kind of an awful wall question,
but I'm really interested in time. I'm really interested in the monetization of
time that really happens starting with the industrial revolution, because if you think about
it prior to that, you know it's by large negrarian society. You have
a sort of a task based life. Well, I have to know,
I've got to till this field over long it takes me to till this field?
Is however long it takes me to till this field. Then, but
when we transition to an industrialized economy, suddenly everything is judged on time,
Like, well, you work this shift from this time to this time,
and you're not paid necessarily based on the output, but based on the amount
of time that you spend here. I wonder do you think in the as
we move to sort of a de industrialized tertiary economy, do you think there'll
be a move away from that in the future or do you think, well,
we're kind of we're kind of stuck still in this idea of, well,
you know, you owe me eight hours of time, and that's what
I'm going to judge your productivity on. I'm just curious. Haven't we already
started to see that in the work from home phenomena? I think so,
And that's kind of what That's kind of what I was wondering, which,
by the way, I'm in favor of, Like I've always thought, it's
rather silly if you can accomplish a task in twenty minutes to say that you
need to spend an hour doing it. You know, we should move off
from that. But you know, just one of those things. Well,
but I think there's another aspect to it as well, which is you and
I are recording this on a Sunday morning. Sundays used to be sacricyct.
You know, before we recorded this, I was sitting at my desk here
at home working. I will be working after we record this. The constant
connectivity has made time fungible and and uh and and the barriers that used to
exist, the structural barriers that used to exist about this is how you spend
time no longer exist. And we're working our way as a society right now
through that question. I mean what do you do if you when you go
back to work. How many meetings have ever been into where people say,
all right, you turn your phones off now, and we got to we
we're trying to come up with those new cultural behavioral rules. And what I've
been talking about is the need to come up with with new commercial behavior or
rules. Yeah, I think, and I think that those behavior rules are
something that we're still we're still working through in a lot of ways. And
you do kind of think about the idea of the meeting. Now, Now
you might have a meeting where everyone in the building is joining via zoom,
even though they're all in the building together, and like how that alters whether
what we see the purpose of this is a little bit different, especially with
the knowledge that all of us have, which is when I'm talking on a
zoom meeting, I know people are probably kind of listening, most of them,
They're not one hundred percent locked in. Now, as a teacher,
I'm used to most people not listening to what I'm saying. But that's that's
just me. But let's just ask I am just kind of curious you talk
about the idea of sort of virtual reality and AI as we sort of get
to the end of the book and sort of like what guard rails does the
guilded Ay suggest to us that we need to get in place as these new
technologies come out that could just blow the doors off. I mean, you
talk about exponential growth in technology, but once real functioning AI and we're starting
to see the edges of it right now, but once it's firmly up and
running, I don't think we can even conceive of the number of things that
we're going to change. And so I'm wondering, like, can we Monday
morning quarterback this or before this genie is out of the bottle, do we
need to sit down and say, gosh, we really should come up with
some rules right now, because trying to do this after the fact could get
real ugly. Well, as you know from the book, I'm of the
latter school. But you know, it's interesting that the Internet, which has
had such a profound impact on how we all live our lives and how commerce
operates, was in essence a call and a response kind of structure in which
we would go to the internet, go to a place on the Internet,
and then react to our screen. It was a two dimensional activity, both
the metaverse and AI, and I think the thing that we need to make
sure that we don't forget is that it is AI that runs the metaverse.
But both the metaverse and AI take the user into that screen. If you
will chat GPT, I'm talking to chat Jeep, I'm chatting with them,
but even more powerfully, in the metaverse, I'm inside, I am interacting
with somebody else. We have moved the metaverse moves us from social media where
we sit there and look at what others type or show as video, to
social virtual reality where I'm inside interacting with somebody. It's exciting. I mean,
we all see the ads that meta is running on TV and elsewhere talking
about how surgeons will be able to practice in the metaverse before they ever lay
a scalpel on your body or mind. I like that idea. As a
history teacher, you've got to love the idea that the students can transport back
to the Roman era and be there with Mark Anthony on the steps of the
Roman Forum. But the issues that arise out of that just start with the
question of privacy. They what information is displayed, How there will be competitive
alternatives that you and I as consumers can can consider. Those are issues.
Those are very real issues that we have to solve as the metaverse and AI
expands. But the answer we're getting, at least from the metaverse is all,
don't worry. You know, we got plenty of time to work that
out. No, we don't. You know, so Mark Sockerberg, who
who I admire a great deal. Mark Zuckerberg's mantra, which became the mantra
of Silicon Valley move fast and break things. You know, he wasn't breaking
computers, he wasn't breaking the China. He was breaking the behavioral patterns that
for over a century had provided stability and why do you move fast? You
move fast so that those changes are adopted before anybody really understands the depth of
their impact. We've learned that lesson. Now with metaverse and AI, are
we going to practice what we've learned? Are we going to put in place
the learnings from that experience and not say, oh, let's just wait.
You know, we've got plenty of time to work this out. Meanwhile,
the effects of the new technology are becoming buried in our daily lives and economic
activity to a point where they're almost untouchable. That's our challenge, and I
think it's a big challenge, and I think, but I think it's a
necessary challenge. I tend to agree with you that the longer we wait,
the more difficult this is going to become for society in general. Another thing
I think about when you sort of talk about the yes as a history teacher,
I'm really excited about virtual reality and being able to pull people into the
history. But one of the things I wonder about is whose history? Who's
deciding? Because you know, I've lived in a variety of different states,
and if you I'm in Texas right now, and if you open a textbook
in the public school here in American history, you won't see the word slave.
You'll see the word worker. And so if I say go back to
I'm gonna do virtual reality, I'm gonna go back to Louisiana in eighteen twenty.
What am I going to see? What's it going to show me like?
Because who's feeding that information in there? I could get two really different
pictures. And how does that then start to shape our collective views of our
past in ways that we may be very happy with and ways that we may
be very unhappy with. And there may be groups who are very happy and
groups that are very unhappy at the same time, and how are we going
to navigate that? But we need to have that debate. Now. I
couldn't agree with you more. I couldn't agree with you more. And putting
it in a box and putting in the back and saying we're not going to
talk about this is not going to solve any problems. But well, this
has been a great conversation. It's a much longer book, obviously, But
was there anything else that you really wanted to add that you feel like maybe
we missed now, Adam, you know, it's great to be able to
talk to a historian about how you make history relevant today. And I thoroughly
enjoyed this and appreciate the opportunity. Thank you very much. Well, it's
a great book. I really I always appreciate books that try to connect the
past to the present because it makes it much more relevant. This book does
that in spades. So thank you so much for coming on. It's been
really a wonderful conversation. Thanks Adam.