Six Degrees of Separation or Three Connections from Controversy

    In May I began an experiment in carefully curating my search and rabbit hole activity on my paid YouTube channel. See my post titled "YouTube and the Algorithmic Unconscious" for details. My goal: to see how long I could keep the distractions and diversions of my media consumption at bay. For context, I have three YouTube accounts that I've used at one time or another in my video surfing travels. My first Google account is where I purchased most of my movies and TV shows: Arrival, the Edge of Tomorrow, the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy, Rick and Morty. There, I am truly a Renaissance man of sci-fi and it's intermingling with comedic pop-culture.

    My second account was created as a secondary email for a comedy collective of myself and 7 friends in the early 2000s. Not realizing that separate accounts with separate passwords meant separate libraries of video content, I collected other cultural gems such as Game of Thrones seasons 1-4 (we all know why I stopped there), Glengarry Glenross (all-time giants of film and Oscar Award winners in a David Mamet screenplay? Yes please), Spotlight, Aliens and two Hannibal Burress specials. I'm a fan of great dialogue...and creatures with acid for blood.

    Both accounts were paid at one time or another and I sometimes feel as though I am switching between them in the way Val Kilmer dons divine alter egos in The Saint. When I was footing the bill for either of them depended on what manner of browsing content I wanted to peruse ad-free. The former account: podcasts and Chicago Bears news and highlights. The latter, stand-up comedians, Marvel what-if? theories and Chicago Bears news and highlights. 

    In separate fits of self control I suspended my paid subscriptions for each of them in favor of a more disciplined approach to my free time. This approach was marginally successful, but my purchased movies and TV shows would remain ad free. So the bedrock of my media consumption remained unbroken.

    In previous blog entries I have discussed my tribulations in keeping my now third YouTube account/Google profile pruned of all such content and purely dedicated to the big-boy work of acquiring and sharing knowledge in the fields of UX/UI, technology and mind-building podcasts. And now, just over 7 weeks into my experiment, I have noticed a somewhat troubling but not entirely unexpected phenomenon: Controversy Baiting.

    Here's an example. I am a sucker for a good podcast and there are a bevy of 2-3 hour discussions that can accompany my morning routine of driving to the gym, exercising, showering and making/eating breakfast. On my paid YouTube channel in May it all started with Steven Bartlett's "Diary of a CEO." For those unfamiliar, Steven Bartlett is an entrepreneur, motivational speaker and social media influencer from the U.K. known for his success in building businesses and inspiring others. He attracts some of the most compelling, well-respected guests out there such as author Simon Sinek and neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. They have fascinating discussions on the nature of motivation, creativity, interpersonal relationships and all manner of other topics.

    And for a time, it was good. I would be referred to 3 hour discussions between Andrew Huberman and Rick Rubin (a prolific music producer who's worked with artists from the Beastie Boys and Jay-Z to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Johnny Cash) about what it's like to explore everything and anything. However, I was cautious about how far to search and click when pop culture came into the mix. Do I revisit my favorite tracks from Danger Mouse's The Grey Album? Do I risk several tangential videos about rap beefs and copyright infringement? Or does that belong on one of my original ad-heavy accounts?

    In my heart, my intentions were pure. Stay on healthy topics, watch my Webflow tutorials, and keep the music consumption to calming, background ambience for productive work time. Enter the so called "Intellectual Dark Web." One thing Steven Bartlett and Andrew Huberman have in common is that they've sat and talked with Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist, professor and author. Peterson has been a lightning rod for both acclaim and criticism for his takes on psychology, philosophy, politics and culture, and more infamously his refusal to use gender neutral pronouns in his classroom and public speaking engagements. The latter you'd never know from his interviews with entrepreneurs and academics. But you'd know it once the controversy started creeping into your YouTube feeds.

    The back bone's connected to the neck bone. The neck bone's connected head bone. The head bone's connected to the podcast. The podcast's connected to the controversy. And sooner or later you're anti-woke. I listened to Steven Bartlett interview Jordan Peterson and was wholly moved by Peterson's thoughts on self-awareness and improvement; So much so that I re-listened to a 10 minute clip of the 2 hour conversation more than a half-dozen times so I could ingrain the exercise he described into my bedtime journaling that evening. YouTube overheard.

    But what was the algorithmic takeaway? That I was a person who wanted to commit to self-improvement? I would be thoroughly engaged by motivational speeches? To an extent, yes. Motivational speeches by Jordan Peterson began to flood my feed. But they didn't stop there. Soon the Joe Rogan "Pretend Your Life is a Movie" mantra took root in the garden. Joe Rogan had interviewed Jordan Peterson in 2016 at the epicenter of his compelled speech fiasco? Of course he had. Jordan Peterson later appeared on the same podcast with Bret Weinstein in 2018 discussing similar controversies at Evergreen State College? Why of course they had.

    Now the TikTok-esque video reel of my prized, carefully curated YouTube account was littered with titles like "Jordan Peterson ANNIHILATES woke liberal" and "Ben Shapiro leaves radical feminist SPEECHLESS." Let the hair tearing-out This writing is not about the right or wrongness of these leading conservative thinkers. But, it has everything to do with what YouTube considers engaging to me. 

    My backbone was now firmly connected to the outrage bone. I am not ashamed to admit that my viewing habits on my original YouTube account had included the Joe Rogan Experience. To me, Joe is a comedian first and some of my all time favorites have shared gut-bursting conversations with him. Occasionally controversial topics come up. But the tone of the conversation is invariably "what makes us laugh in this place?" 

    Dating back to Eddie Murphy and George Carlin, I have been an avid consumer of stand-up comedy since my dad first sat me down in front of "Carlin on Campus." Comedy is uniquely equipped to engage minds in the provocative and taboo of the moment. Whatever you may think of the politics a comedian espouses or lampoons, you cannot deny that they make you think about your own values. And to me, that is the point of podcasts: nuanced learning and reflection.

    But this is now hopelessly entangled with shaky phone cam footage of Ben Shapiro debating ill-prepared college students. Am I averse to being exposed to the ideas therein? Not exactly. However, I am exhausted by the framing of the arguments. My outrage bone has a low threshold that I have been working around with a well-selected media diet. And I am now being thrown in front of a trough of intellectual junk food. All it takes is an interest in Neuralink's latest developments to go from Elon Musk to Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson to climate change conspiracy theories in three clicks flat. 

    Thanks to Andrew Huberman and some Chat GPT queries, I am not surprised to learn that both humor and outrage are associated with some of the same parts of the brain. The amygdala and prefrontal cortex both play important parts in these emotional responses. The amygdala processes your emotional reaction to things while the prefrontal cortex analyzes why something upsets or entertains you. But with humor, a cousin of the amygdala is also more directly at play: the hippocampus. Both are parts of the limbic system. But the hippocampus is more directly associated with learning and the formation of memory. This probably explains why I am able to summon answers to obscure Jeopardy! questions using Simpsons references.

    So my intention to use YouTube for learning is being hamstrung when the algorithms lead with the angry foot and not the happy foot. I learn more. And I'm here to learn folks. It makes sense that outrage encourages a recoil in my brain that prefers not to learn new facts. I'm far more interested in learning why my body feels good after a workout than I am in why my hand hurts after touching the stove. 

    Here is where I want YouTube and other technologies to do better. My interests are best served in engaging my curiosity and joy responses. There are personalities out there that are marred by controversy, but still share ideas and sentiment that even their fiercest detractors would echo were it confined to anonymous words on a page. I wish for my recommendations to be formed by the quality of my content and not the controversial tinderbox hiding in the trunk. If YouTube finds a way to program that algorithm, they'll have made my daily rabbit hole.

Some of the content of this blog entry was researched using generative A.I. resources such as Chat GPT. In the interest of transparency I would like to share the link to this chat: Chat GPT Conversation