Welcome to Inside the Hive. I am your host Nick Bilton. So a few months ago a friend of mine came over for dinner and I was talking about how I struggle with social media, how I delete the apps from my phone

and they somehow get re-installed and things like that.

And he told me, and this is someone who has worked in tech for a very long time, including

in some social companies that he recently decided that

was it he was done he was done fighting the algorithms of Facebook and Instagram

and so on so he went onto these websites he changed his password to a series of random numbers that he wrote down and put into an email address, a completely new email address that he created.

He put all these passwords in there and then he created a new

password for this new random email address. There was a series of about 30 letters

and numbers which he then wrote down on a piece of paper and hid inside his house.

So if he ever wants to go back to social media, which he doesn't, but just to ensure that

he won't, he has to go through this escape room-like experience to go find the

password and re-enter them and everything.

The thing that's really amazing about this story is not that we all want to quit social media,

but it is the lengths that we have to go to to try to quit.

And the reason for that is because there are algorithms in these platforms

that are trying to get inside your soul.

So my guest today is not the friend who quit social media, but it is someone who is trying

to lead the charge in Silicon Valley to help people understand how these algorithms are essentially

becoming drugs and destroying their lives and how you can fight back

against them and at the same time he is trying to convince Silicon Valley engineers and

people like Mark Zuckerberg and folks at Google and Twitter and elsewhere to start to think more ethically about the role that they play in the way these social media apps

essentially just fuck with our brains.

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