#251 Alex Winter and The YouTube Effect

CTS Announcer 0:01

If you're a pop culture junkie, who loves TV, film, music, comedy and other really important stuff, then you've come to the right place. Get ready and settle in for classic conversation, the best pop culture interviews in the world. That's right, we circled the globe. So you don't have to. If you're ready to be the king of the water cooler, then you're ready for classic conversations with your host, Jeff Dwoskin.

Jeff Dwoskin 0:28

All right. Joanna, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. You get this show going each and every week, and this week was no exception. Welcome, everybody to Episode 251 of classic conversations. As always, I am your host, Jeff Dwoskin. Great to have you back for what's sure to be an eye opening episode with my special guest, Alex winter. That's right. Bill S Preston Esquire, himself, co founder of wild stallions is here he's swung by Alex when not time traveling with Keanu Reeves makes amazing documentary films, and he swung by to talk about his latest one, the YouTube effect. It's incredible. A must see and that's coming up in just a few seconds. And in these few seconds, just want to remind everyone of episode 250 with Burt Ward, the Boy Wonder himself robbing from TVs Batman. Don't miss that amazing episode. But right now, I've got Alex winters. full attention to talk about the YouTube effect is latest documentary. To tee it up though, I'm going to do something a little different. Another recent guest, Gail and herd was on the show. She was the producer of the YouTube effect. Also executive producer of Terminator Terminator two aliens in every other movie Love Gail, join me on episode 244 classic conversation. So check that one out after you listen to this one. But Gail did talk briefly about the YouTube effect. So I'm going to use that as an intro. Take it away, Gail.

Gale Anne Hurd 2:11

And my most recent documentary is called the YouTube effect. And it's directed by Alex winter that most people know through Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. But he's also a very highly regarded documentarian, who's done a lot of documentaries about blockchain, the dark web, the Panama Papers, also Frank Zappa. And and this is the story, the story of you to both how it came to be and then and then moving into the algorithm. And its impact on sadly, the driving people down conspiracy theory, rabbit holes, because of its content algorithm that essentially encourages you to become even more radicalized. It'll be released this summer.

Jeff Dwoskin 3:02

Thank you, Gail. And now my one on one with Alex winter. Well, thanks for having me, Alex. I sure I was interviewing a gale Anne Hurd and I was like, you know, Alex winter. Because they had the YouTube effect on the email footer. Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I mean, I know we're here to talk about the YouTube effect. But I gotta say, Bill and Ted Bill and Ted's Excellent venture favorite movie ever just rewatched it just because I needed to. It's something that I watched in college. And so my friends and I, we quoted it forever. The one thing that you know, you have those friends that you don't talk to for a while, but when you talk to it's like, no time and pass, and the first thing we always say to each other would be excellent.

Alex Winter 3:45

That's great. I love that.

Jeff Dwoskin 3:47

So anyway, so this is a thrill. My other passion is technology. So I love this. i Oh, great. I love the YouTube effect. Thank you. Social media lately has been such a so hard with all the misinformation and everything coming at you. Your movie didn't help alleviate man, my anxiety.

Alex Winter 4:08

No, I know. It's, you know, people telling me they're so rattled at the end. I just need a stiff drink. But what are you going to do? That's where the story took us. So we followed.

Jeff Dwoskin 4:16

I'm glad you did. So your voice is a director you do a lot of technology and how it impacts the world downloading web trust machine. At what point did this become something you realized, Oh, this is a passion. I'm gonna fall. This is my voice, at least for one thread of my creativity.

Alex Winter 4:34

Yeah, I mean, that's a good, good question. The fact is I got really heavily involved in the internet in the early days and then that I think I got I got my Mac classic and 83 That wasn't my first computer, but it was the first one that you could plug up phone cord into the back of and then I got onto the BBS Usenet land of that era, and found the growth of internet community there to be a real refuge and something that I Really enjoyed being part of. But it also felt like the growth of the beginning of something quite impactful and that you could feel what would then you know, many years later become kind of the Occupy movement or the Arab Spring or ways in which the sort of flattening of culture, the democratization of culture was going to have power. And it was going to bring people together in ways that would have a lot of power. And that became evident to me in the 80s. And then, when Napster came around, I was very, very involved with Napster, just as a layman. And then I eventually met Shawn Fanning and talked to Paramount about making a movie about him. And they didn't even really understand him. He just thought he was the Antichrist. But I set up a film that I was going to write and direct there. And I spent a lot of time with Fanning and Parker, as Napster was collapsing in early 2000s. And that eventually evolved into my documentary downloaded, which was my first doc. And so I've just been consistently interested in the growth of online community and its impact on culture. And because I've been around the net for a long time, I have a lot of contacts in that area. So I've had a kind of a, a very close, front row view of the birth of the digital revolution, for good and ill. And that has helped me to tell the stories

Jeff Dwoskin 6:15

with the YouTube effect. How far back were you starting this like pre pandemic? Or because during the pandemic? I mean, I think it was very clear that wow, the role YouTube played in the pandemic, in terms of getting certain videos out and certain pieces of misinformation out,

Alex Winter 6:30

ya know, we started this before the pandemic, but it was already, you know, look, it was posted 2016 election, when we really understood that these platforms were having a direct impact on elections and on both for good and ill it was getting information out that people needed about what was going on in their world. And it was proliferating propaganda and disinformation. And that was very evident by 2016. I mean, the rise of Trump was really I mean, I think it was a lot of us whose evidence well before that, and really came to a head when we had the Christchurch shooting, and that shooter was so specific about being radicalized on YouTube. But there wasn't a whole lot of people talking about it at that point. And I think that, as we made the we started make that film, we weren't necessarily going to focus so intensely on that end of of the platform, though, I had always intended to look at the harms, as well as the positive. But it really was the narrative that was unfolding while we were shooting, and it was so significant, and YouTube played such a significant and I would say primary role in a lot of those events, that it became kind of imperative to focus on it. And if you have a global community, and this is kind of my whole thesis around technology that I think a lot of people, I don't say get wrong, it sounds patronizing, but it just they don't share that view that, you know, technology is just an outgrowth of society, right. It's not, it's not alien to society. It's not separate from society. It's not a thing that you can either use or not use. It's just it is just the evolution of society. So when you have a community as big as YouTube, when the world is going crazy, well, it's gonna go crazy with the world. And that was something that we felt we had to focus on.

Jeff Dwoskin 8:12

I agree with that thesis. I mean, it's it helps exasperate what exists already, right. So if you give people the tools to be good or evil, and that's their nature, then ultimately, that's how they'll use those tools. Yeah, the big question is, do you do you think that any social media platform can exist without evolving to its lowest common denominator?

Alex Winter 8:36

I don't think any platform and I wouldn't necessarily call YouTube a social media platform, though, it includes a social media component, for sure. But it's just so much more than that. But I don't think any large scale internet community or platform can exist without just like, you can't have New York City. Without the streets, you don't want to go down. Right, right. And sometimes those streets bleed out into the rest of New York City. And sometimes they don't. And that's just kind of where the winds of change are going in terms of where society is going. Is so goes the internet, right? So there are going to be times when that community is more dangerous. And there are going to be times when that community is more dangerous to certain individuals. And there gonna be times when it's less dangerous, certain individuals. So I'd say that it doesn't the whole thing. I wouldn't say that the whole, unlike Twitter, which would be kind of a whole separate conversation, because it's being driven, currently being owned and driven by someone who has an agenda that is specifically hate filled and anti democratic and is driving very specific targeted aid from the top down, which is not common. Right. You can't say that about tick tock, you can't say that about about Instagram. And you certainly can't say that about a platform and a company and an entity as large as YouTube, which is not driven by anything other than a financial capitalist agenda. It has no political agenda. So I'd say generally It doesn't completely devolve. I think there's there's even people who need to stay on Twitter and bad as it is, because that's where their community lives. So even as devolved, you can't get more devolved in Twitter. Because like, there's no, there's no lower bar than where that platform is right now. And yet, there are people who really need to stay on platform, because that's where the community is. I think Russia is a good analogy, right? I think you have a country filled with incredible people that have done amazing things run by a fascist lunatic, but they're still great people in Russia. So that's, you know, that's Twitter today.

Jeff Dwoskin 10:38

Sorry to interrupt, but have to take a quick break. I want to thank everyone for their support of the sponsors. When you support the sponsors. You're supporting us here at Classic conversations. And that's how we keep the lights on. And now back to my conversation with Alec winter. Yeah, I was very, very active on Twitter. I have I'm one of those people, I didn't leave. Because like you said, you know, there's, there's people there that are a part of that community that I've built over the years. But I've definitely, I've definitely stopped because I just got tired of saying something and having 50 Nazis or like people just it's an

Alex Winter 11:12

unsafe it's an unsafe environment. It's a legitimately unsafe environment, and that violence carries off platform. So it's not I mean, it never was a free speech issue. Because, you know, the First Amendment has nothing to do with the corporate platform, which none of these imbeciles seem to understand. But but there's real world harm that comes from that level of targeted. Hey, and so I got off for that reason, I didn't want one of these crazy people showing up at my house. But it's it's a very unsafe environment, but there are people who need to remain,

Jeff Dwoskin 11:38

right. It's kind of like, just keep one foot in the door, just in case you need to help someone or pull someone out. But yeah, yeah, I mean, YouTube, I keep YouTube safe by you know, making sure no one no more than 20 or 30, people look at my videos.

Alex Winter 11:56

Look, I think YouTube is, you know, they did to be fair to them. I don't think it's an algorithmic issue anymore. I think their algorithm, there are some algorithmic issues, I wouldn't completely dismiss it. But the issue with the recommender algorithm was largely taken care of by them. And it was very hard to go on to YouTube looking for fuzzy slippers, and then suddenly be buying APKs to, you know, take over a government, which used to be the case, you know, my kid would go on to do something benign and end up down some crazy rabbit hole and would come running to me asking me why he was being fed Nazi videos. But that's very hard to find there now. And that way, you can find those videos, but you don't get recommended them for no reason. So I think YouTube has done, you know, a lot of good where they can, but they haven't done enough good and other areas. And I think they do still need a lot of work.

Jeff Dwoskin 12:40

If you could sit with them and say are these are the top things you need to fix to make YouTube a safer place? What would those be?

Alex Winter 12:48

They would I mean, it would, it would get all those people fired. So they will never do this. I think the government's gonna come along and make them do this, but it would be changing their business model, probably not being an ad based model at all, but a subscription based model. It would be D platform D platforming some of their biggest influencers, who are just spouting white supremacist, terrorist incitement and monetizing the heck out of it, it would be doing better content moderation, which while they rightfully claim is very difficult, and it is very difficult. They recently as of I think a week ago, just reversed their own policy of D platforming stop the steel propaganda. So now they are allowing 2020 misinformation back onto the platform as we go into an election year that is the opposite of content moderation. And you can't claim that it's impossible, because they were doing it up until a week ago. So those are some of the obvious things. And there are many, many things like that.

Jeff Dwoskin 13:40

How's the reception of the film band since debuting at the Tribeca Film Festival?

Alex Winter 13:46

It's been great. And, look, you never know when you make something topical, you never know whether anyone's going to shrug their shoulders and save me. Right. And it's really been the inverse of that. And I'm very grateful, especially with younger people, which I really did not expect. I didn't even really make the movie for people 25 years of age and younger, because I've got kids that age, and I know they generally don't want to hear from me, right? Or anybody, especially about technology about you know, their world from like, you know, whatever a Gen X or an old fogies least I'm not a boomer, but I'm like the next and you know, the next level down and enemies. So, that has been a very robust response. So we started targeting high schools and colleges and showing the film there over the last year. And we're going to be doing some summits. I'm doing a disinformation Summit. We're showing the movie at Cambridge University in England at the end of the month I'm doing I'm doing those at some very big universities where we go and show the film and get into some of these issues. So I've been very gratified. I think that what happened was, you know, the film largely ends with an examination of 2020 through the lens of technology's role and what happened that year and I just think had to come out any sooner. People would have been too close to the insanity to even process it. And I think that people are just about ready to look back at like, What the hell was that, especially as we go into 2024 elections, and the world's about to get totally nutty again, which it is, I think people are really ready to examine technology's role in the mess that we're currently in, as well as its ability to help. And I think YouTube is uniquely positioned to be able to help as well as harm. And so I think it's gone over for that reason.

Jeff Dwoskin 15:28

I think the timing, you know, sometimes it's about timing and stuff like that. And I feel like with my kids, the there has been a sort of transition from social media being the place where they're obsessed with posting to realizing that it can have a negative impact, a negative impact on their mental health. And my youngest daughter was just watching the I can't remember the name of it, but there was it was on Netflix a couple of years ago with about the social algorithm should dilemma, the same dilemma, thank you. And that's resonating with that, which is important, because now is a one two punch to come around with a YouTube effect to kind of see and expand it and say, you know, it's, it's really dangerous, and it's really out there. And it's making you feel ways that you shouldn't feel but they're making you feel that way on purpose. There's things that are happening beyond your control. My my oldest daughter took a break, I self break, like she understood that. But that's something that years ago, or even two years ago, two months ago, which I guess in tech terms is eight years, but 100 years. Yeah, but I mean, that's that's a good thing. So the fortunate timing, also of this movie might be that especially with tick tock because I think you can relate this to what's happening on tick tock with the algorithms and the videos that and the rabbit holes that can go down on tick tock as well. I think it's an easy to look at this and say that's, that's not a far jump. So

Alex Winter 16:53

yeah, I mean, it's really not platform specific. In that way, you're dealing with largely parasocial relationships that occur because you know, you've got someone looking at into a webcam on one end, and you're looking into yours on the other and what that does to you, and the incredible power that that has. And to your point about your daughter like that is emotionally taxing. It's not always emotionally negative, but it can create kind of a post traumatic stress effect. And that's a real thing. I mean, I've said two classes when we're talking like, No, it's not, you know, technology is not any different than the rest of society. But it is very powerful in a way that just walking into your junior high school cafeteria is not as powerful. So it's like your junior high school cafeteria, magnified times a billion, that's a lot.

Jeff Dwoskin 17:40

So change can't come until popular momentum. Alright, so that's kind of one of the themes. So when someone watches this, what is something that they can do to help make a difference, or would be something that you would want them to do is take a next step to help further the message beyond just saying, Hey, you got to watch this.

Alex Winter 17:58

I think that for parents for sort of our generation, it's to kind of reorient your thinking around technology. And to stop thinking of it as something you have to demand that your kids stop using, or that it's this kind of this, this fad, or this gimmick or this other world that they go to and start understanding that it is absolutely a fundamental core aspect of modern society that is not going away, and that you cannot make go away and isn't separate from society. And once you look at it, that way, you can be much more productive and proactive, and it will almost be obvious ways for you to get involved. So the thing I always tell people is don't drive away from this stuff drive towards it. And that doesn't, that's not some hokey way of saying, you know, get on social media more, it's just to say, who are the influencers? How does this thing work? What are the benefits, what's the full picture and then then you'll know where you can be abused, you'll know what corner of society you fit into, where you can do something, and I think it becomes very obvious, once you're more engaged is very difficult, if you're disengaged, or if you're like, so it's so anti the whole thing that you don't pay any attention to any of it, and then it's just gonna run roughshod over you. I mean, it's society is the same way. If you walk down the wrong street in a city and you're just like, blah, blah, blah, I'm going to ignore that these bad things happen, well, then you're gonna get mugged. And I think it's very similar in this world. There's a lot of great things here. It's not going anywhere, anywhere. It's just part of our global society. Now learn about it, get involved, be aware, and then it'll show you where you can be of help.

Jeff Dwoskin 19:30

Amazing. Final quick question. Is there another corner of technology in the back? That you're got your eye on for your next project?

Alex Winter 19:38

No. I mean, there's always there's areas that are really interesting if I was making another tech doc right now and I know probably there's 25 Great doc filmmakers doing it. I would absolutely look at what Elon Musk has done to Twitter, which I think is extremely significant culturally and largely, well, no, entirely negative. I think what's coming with AI, which I think is different than than the current culture seems to think Could not necessarily all good, but not as all that is, is being perceived. This is another area of interest to me, but I think that it needs to it needs to evolve more before I would want to tackle it. Excellent.

Jeff Dwoskin 20:11

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate ya.

Alex Winter 20:14

Thank you. Yeah, likewise, so it's great.

Jeff Dwoskin 20:17

All right. How amazing is Alex winter, I know go check out the YouTube effect when it is released in your area or streaming. Gotta see this movie. It's a really important movie to watch. You can find out more at Alex winter.com as Alex's website, I'll put a link in the show notes. And there you have it. Episode 251 is in the books. Special thanks to Alex winter. And of course Special Thanks, all of you for coming back week after week means the world to me, and I'll see you next time.

CTS Announcer 20:47

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Classic conversations. If you like what you heard, don't be shy and give us a follow on your favorite podcast app. But also, why not go ahead and tell all your friends about the show? You strike us as the kind of person that people listen to. Thanks in advance for spreading the word and we'll catch you next time on classic conversations.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai