Oliver Anthony: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s the transitionary state, and one of the responsibilities I take very serious, because I agree with you, is I tried to pierce the bubble that is the San Francisco, that is the Silicon Valley, that is the people that build these technologies, they often live a bit in a bubble. That said, the people that criticize tech folks also live in a bubble. And to, first of all, piercing bubbles in general is good for people to get along, to understand each other, because people that say all technology is evil, unfortunately, even if that’s true, which I don’t think it is, it’s coming. It’s going to be built. And so, you have to figure out how to do it in a way that preserves our humanity, that doesn’t drag us into this black hole of just maximizing engagement, maximizing this dopamine thing, where instead of reading Dostoevsky, which I should be doing, I’m looking at some girl shaking her ass on Instagram, and then feeling horrible about myself five minutes later. That, at scale is what seems to be happening. And so, reminding ourselves that this is not the way to steer human civilization to progress, to flourishing. The problem is I think we’re wasting a lot of our bandwidth. We only have so many minutes in the day to even use our brains, and our brains can only do but so much in a day anyway. And when we’re wasting any of it on just that, it’s like, I see it, in my own professional opinion, as the world is becoming just a little more, in the last decade or two, as the world becomes a little more dreary and dark, and more problems happen, and city streets become more littered, and jobs are… All these kinds of problems that we all argue about all the time, as they become more prevalent, it’s like the internet and just the visuals of the internet become so much more immersive, and video games are so much more… Everything’s so much better, everything’s improving at lightning speed in technology, and it’s degrading in society, and in the real world. And somehow there’s got to be a way to find a balance there. But right now, it seems like as technology becomes more immersive and addictive and interactive, the way these algorithms feed us exactly what we want, and there’s so much psychology, and just so much research that goes into making them as addictive as possible, it’s like the real world kind of sucks. … tip is possible. It’s like the real world kind of sucks. Cities that were beautiful and thriving are now falling apart, and have all kinds of problems that are being unaddressed, and lack of leader… It’s like there’s got to be some kind of way, and so it’s easy for us to feel more and more inclined to escape into the digital realm because the digital realm is becoming more fun while real life is becoming less fun, and there’s got to be some kind of way to balance between the two. I’m with you. I’m not against technology at all. I think evil most certainly existed long before there were computers and in even more treacherous ways. Now we have the ability to do… Like I said, we’re in a very temporary state right now in 2025, where the general public has access to basically all the information there is, and artificial intelligence, and just immense, and the ability that a guy can just set a bunch of cameras up, and start doing podcasts, and have even just the fact that your platform could be created is immensely powerful. It probably never existed in world history up until now, but we also still have… The problem is if we just keep going without being careful about losing the real world aspect of it, is that at some point we’re just going to get so lost and so immersed in this space, we’re not even going to know what we’re missing out on. All there’s going to be is Girls on Instagram. All there’s going to be is that. Yeah, I’ve been trying to figure it all out. I just did a super long podcast with Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic Games who created Fortnite. He created Unreal Engine, a lot of interesting video games, revolutionary video games. So I don’t know if you know, but Fortnite is this gigantic video game where people go into an online world and they shoot stuff. It’s fun. It’s not like Call of Duty intense, militaristic, raw, real kind of shooting. It’s more fun shooting at each other. But at first I was skeptical, is that a good way to hang out with friends? But then I got to do it with people that I’m actually friends with in physical reality, and you get to hear each other’s voice, and you just talk, and talk shit about each other together. It’s basically a phone call, honestly, with some visuals. It’s not about the visuals, it’s about the phone call and it just makes it a little more convenient to connect regularly. But I think you do need to remember that all of that only works if you’re consistently returning to physical reality. In this case, taking the, quote, unquote, “Guy trip.” Not the Brokeback Mountain style, but just friends. Just friends, a trip out in nature together, like dudes on a hunting trip, or just fishing, or just hanging out in physical reality together. We should not forget the importance of that.…

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