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The Current Transcript for December 26, 2018

Host: Piya Chattopadhyay

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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VOICE: We wanted to build kind of a bed that was the most universally comfortable bed ever created and we packaged it in a box that lets us ship it anywhere in the country and we sell it only directly to consumers through our website.

PIYA CHATTOPADHYAY: That's the CEO of a mattress company that's been hugely popular with millennials and hugely disruptive to the bricks and mortar model of selling expensive things to sleep on. It's just one corner of the retail universe that has been upended by new business models catering to millennial tastes. On this Boxing Day, as the shopping malls are overflowing with people looking for actual in person bargains, we're looking at the way the shopping habits of millennials are rearranging the world of retail and how companies are also trying to adapt. Also today, on The Current.

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VOICE: Every piece of content that you share on Facebook, you own and you have complete control over who sees it and how you share it.

PC: Well the latest scandal to rock Facebook makes founder Mark Zuckerberg claims appear to ring somewhat hollow. Every week seems to bring another reason to break up with social media and yet most of us stay on it. In half an hour, a technological visionary who happens to be a scientist at Microsoft, makes his case for why your New Year's resolution should be signing off social media for good. My interview with Jaron Lanier in half an hour from now. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay in for Anna Maria Tremonti and this is the Boxing Day edition of The Current.

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A millennial writer tested all the online products you can't afford, and was seriously disappointed

Guests: Rebecca Jennings, Marina Strauss

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VOICE: Convenience is the commodity that matters most to our generation. I can't believe I used to physically go to stores, take money out of my pocket and pay for stuff like a peasant. With Amazon, I just do this and things come to me like I'm an emperor. It's not just me. We all love living like King Joffrey.

PC: That's comedian Hasan Minhaj marveling at today's retail reality. When it comes to millennials and the marketplace, we're all familiar with values they supposedly seek out quickness and convenience, feelings and experiences authenticity and Instagramability. Companies today are clamoring to deliver all that and much more to millennial consumers and that's part of what's behind the proliferation of direct to consumer goods from mattresses and bedding to $40 tubes of toothpaste, you've likely been seeing and hearing more ads for products that are just an online click away from being delivered to your door and invariably, these aren't just convenience items, they're billed as the best. Rebecca Jennings is a reporter for Vox Media's The Goods and she recently spent a week using some of these products. She's with us from New York City to share how it all went. Hello.

REBECCA JENNINGS: Hello.

PC: What was the premise of your experiment using these "best things" for a week?

RJ: So yeah the premise was that I would live with all of this amazing stuff for one week and yeah, so I thought I was going to write this very silly thing like oh I have this great mattress now like whatever and I had customizable vitamins, which like who has that? I had customizable shampoo. I had fancy sheets, I had fancy like meal in a box delivery services and it ended up making me feel a lot of feelings.

PC: OK I'm going to ask specifically about some of these products that you just posted, but let's just back up a sec. So when you're heading into the experiment right, at the onset, what insight did you think you were going to get from doing all of this?

RJ: So I knew obviously that this stuff was going to be better than the stuff that I have. I think it's better than the stuff that most people have when they're my age because I mean these products are made by very smart people and they have a lot of venture capitalist money like pumped into them. So I knew I was going to like this stuff and I did it for the most part like it was all like pretty good. Can I say it's the best of you know that's not really my job to say.

PC: OK. So you mentioned custom shampoo, which is that just fancy expensive shampoo?

RJ: So you have to take a very long questionnaire in order to have the exact compound or like the exact chemistry.

PC: It's not like saying I have oily hair, send me the oily hair shampoo. It's not that simple.

RJ: Right. Yeah, this brand, Function of Beauty, they claim that they've never done the same mixture twice for more than one person.

PC: OK. And then I understand you got dental floss.

RJ: I did get dental floss. That was not customisable that was just like fancy floss. It was great.

PC: What is fancy floss? Waxed?

RJ: So I think the difference for a lot of these products is that they have the aesthetic of this fancy direct to consumer product. They have the you know the cool sans serif font. They have really easy to use websites. They make themselves sound really friendly and they're like we're the floss brand, like we have your cool millennial floss and the floss was like there was fun flavours of it. It was blue. You know it was cute.

PC: What was the price tag?

RJ: I think, oh God, t I don't want to say the wrong thing. I don't know. Because also the thing that was that I did not have to pay for any of this stuff.

PC: OK. Hold on, I'm going to I'm going to tell you what it is. It was $22. It was $22 that floss cost.

RJ: OK. Yeah $22 dollar floss.

PC: $22 floss. I just like I'm just imagining like huge bales of floss for $22 like how big? How much floss?

RJ: I think that was a four pack.

PC: Wow.

RJ: So it was a decent amount of floss, but you know it's floss.

PC: OK what else? What else kind of blew your mind in terms of the best products, in terms of like what is this? Not necessarily blew your mind and it's exceptionally good, but like when you first get the stuff, you're like what is this? What did that?

RJ: I think doing the meal kits was pretty wild. I had never done one of those meal kit delivery services before and the idea that you know you get these tiny you get like cumin packaged to you, like one serving of cumin in this tiny plastic bag, which I mean is horrible for the environment. I mean you have this whole meal delivered to you in these tiny packages and it makes like two servings and this huge box of a lot of waste. So that was pretty wild to see like oh my God, people get these delivered to them like every week. Another one was oh I tried this toothpaste that was literally $45.

PC: Regular sized tube?

RJ: Regular sized tube. You can buy it at like really fancy department stores like Neiman Marcus. So that was wild.

PC: Was it better than the $3 toothpaste that I use on my teeth?

RJ: Of course not. I mean yeah. Yeah it was.

PC: So you know you just mentioned like you can get this toothpaste at a retail store at Neiman Marcus, but some of these products you use like are they readily available or where are they being advertised?

RJ: The thing about these is that they're very much targeted toward millennials living in urban places. These are brands that advertise on the subway. These are brands that aren't really advertised or aren't really sold in a Wal-Mart or a department store. They're direct to consumer. So you have to kind of know about them and look for them on the Internet in order to buy them. So that is the main difference. You can't just like go to a store in Ohio and pick up a Casper matris or Brooklinen sheets, you have to hear about this brand. You have to be like oh I know what the best brand is because I saw it on the subway or because my friend recommended it to me. So that was the difference between these products.

PC: And then how, you said they directly target millennials by advertising in places where millennials go, which is like all advertisers do that no matter who they're towards, but is there any more particularity in how they targeted millennials?

RJ: I think they adopt the aesthetic that millennials have come to kind of co-opt as our own.

PC: Which is?

RJ: Which is this sort of venture backed capitalist or venture capitalist backed brand. They have these very friendly looking advertisements in this very one specific style of photography. It's direct flash photography. It's sort of winky, it's sort of whimsical, it's surreal and it's artistic in a way that's also, that will also make the money. It's not like real art, it's you know it's consumer art.

PC: Okay and so I'm glad you brought up sort of the aesthetic because is it idyllic? Is it and I ask that because I want to try to understand how does this marketing strategy intersect with the idea of perfectionism? Like if you use this really expensive toothpaste, don't worry millennial if you don't have a job because perfection.

RJ: Yeah. Absolutely. So I think what these products altogether do they sort of all have the same advertising aesthetic. And so over and over again we get this message that like here is the ideal life of a millennial. Your life can look like this if you have this product, whereas of course you know I talked to actually a psychologist who studies perfectionism for this piece and she was like we get this message constantly that not only is this perfect lifestyle attainable, but that you should be able to go out and get it. That's what these products altogether are selling is this perfect millennial life.

PC: More and more of us whether millennial or Gen X or baby boomer, I mean we're all shopping more and more online for a bazillion different reasons, but many of us are doing that more. With these ones you know these products are sold directly to the consumer, you skip the retail store. What is it because it appeals to all of us not to have to go into a store anymore or at least like across demographics, but what is it about the millennial? Why is this model appealing to younger people, as you say, especially younger urban people?

RJ: I think because it looks so great and it looks and it's so targeted to you that it's and the fact that you can't see it in the stores makes it that much more appealing because it's not something that like everybody that you're like seeing all the time. It's something that you only see in terms of these advertisements and in terms of the way the exact way they want you to see it, which is you know in these gorgeous photographs that are you know the exact aesthetic that they want to portray.

PC: And so we'll get to how you felt at the end in a sec, but as the days progressed, these eight days of using these best products. How does your relationship to these products change as the days wade on?

RJ: That's a good question. I think I took them more and more for granted as the days went on. I think the beginning you know at the beginning I was like oh my God you know my room was clean you know because I had just like set everything up. And then as the days went on it was just sort of like they just became another another pair of leggings in the drawer or another pair of sneakers in my closet. And that's sort of what the point of the story was is that like no they will not make your life better, these advertisements are lies. As much as they are great products themselves, they're still just products and nothing will you know make your life better in that way.

PC: So eight days later, at the end of all this, beyond like you're like oh these are like neat things and they're pretty cool to have, but they're not making me feel happier or better about 2018 in a kind of like deep way. How did they make you feel?

RJ: Nothing inherently within the stuff made me feel bad. They were all good products, but they were still just products and I think the problem with that a lot of times people that are my age think that if we have this stuff, if we obtain this stuff then we will be part of this more ideal life and that just wasn't the case. And I think that as I say in the piece at one point, there is a kind of person that could see that as a positive thing where as like, oh like doesn't really matter what you have like your life will be the same, but yeah I sort of end up disappointed, I guess.

PC: You wrote that it led to an existential crisis. That's a little bit more than disappointing yeah.

RJ: Yeah that was possibly hyperbolic, but it's true. I think that I in general the way I used to think about this stuff was like oh like you're like a millennial sucker like you paid over $100 dollars Allbirds, which aren't really that cute. But you know what.

PC: What are Allbirds? People are saying what are Allbirds.

RJ: Allbirds are sneakers.

PC: OK. I knew. I'm kidding, I didn't.

RJ: Allbirds are sneakers that claim to be like the most comfortable sneakers in the world and they're very comfortable, but they get a lot of like you know flack for being like kind of ugly. And you know what they are, but that's fine. But so anyway so I in general I have a tendency to sort of like make fun of my friends who you know pay for like super expensive products that sort of like are the subway brands, but then I realized after the end of this it was because I made fun of them because I can't even imagine what it's like to you know be able to buy a $2000 mattress if I just decided one day that I needed a mattress.

PC: But how surprised were you by doing this?

RJ: I was super surprised. I mean I set out to write something very silly and lighthearted about like oh no like I tried to do this meal kit and it didn't really work out that well or like these vitamins taste weird. All of which are true, but I certainly did not expect to like really really take a look at my life and what these sorts of advertisements were doing to me and people in my generation. And that's sort of what sparked the resulting piece.

PC: And so the big takeaway from the experiment for you?

RJ: The biggest takeaway is that the products are not going to change your life and that's not specific to millennials or specific to 2018 at all. It's just, it's just true.

PC: And how are your teeth? They must be beautiful.

RJ: My teeth are gorgeous.

PC: OK. So it might have been worth it. Who knows? You should have taken a before picture of your teeth and your gums and then special. I think if I've done my math right, toothpaste and floss together cost almost $70 . So there you go. Rebecca Jennings thank you. Happy halls.

RJ: Thank you so much. Happy holidays to you as well.

PC: Bye bye.

RJ: Bye.

PC: Rebecca Jennings is a reporter for Vox Media's The Goods. We reached her in New York City. Well millennials may have been unfairly blamed for a lot of things, killing everything from the cereal to the auto industries to tuna sandwiches, but in this case, the influence of the millennial generation on a decades old retail model, it's more clear cut. Our next guest has some insight into the disruption happening in the retail world. Marina Strauss is the retail reporter for The Globe and Mail. She's here with me in our Toronto studio. Hello.

MARINA STRAUSS: Hi Piya, how are you doing?

PC: I am good. By the way I just want to say I do know what Allbirds are.

MS: OK.

PC: My husband has a pair, I just didn't know that that's what they were.

MS: Well then you're cool.

PC: So you had a chance to listen to our first guest, Rebecca Jennings. What do you think about her experiment with those products?

MS: You know it was extreme. It was excess for this millennial to have the perfect toothbrush, customized vitamins, meal in a box. It was not what she was used to. She was out of her skin. It wasn't reality, it wasn't authentic and millennials today want authenticity. They want an experience, they don't want things.

PC: So you, I want to pick up on a word you said and it's a word I said in the intro to Rebecca that millennials and I know I'm casting a broad brush of many millions of humans, but they want this experience. And so people are saying like what is the experience of brushing your teeth other than brushing your teeth with toothpaste? Like help me understand, when you say millennials want experience, what does that mean?

MS: They don't care about what toothbrush they use, the toothpaste, they want togo to a bar and talk to people or it doesn't have to be a bar. They can go to a coffee shop and they sure do a lot of that. They want to travel, they want to have things in common with other people. They don't care about their toothbrushes. And so Rebecca was given the perfect everything for a week and she found out that's not what you really needed and it was a great discovery and a very millennial in that way.

PC: So you're not a millennial. Were you surprised at all at the outcome of like the journey that Rebecca went on and the existential crisis she said she felt at the end?

MS: I wasn't because that consumer is a conscious consumer. That consumer cares about sustainability, about pollution and the more she got, the more she realized she was getting things in boxes that needed to be thrown out. She was creating pollution. She was creating the type of world she didn't want to be in and all that didn't jive with her beliefs.

PC: OK so a lot of the products she tested cause she's American, are American. I know that we have meal delivery services here in Canada, but beyond those are similar products being marketed to us or to millennials here in Canada?

MS: Sure we have them. We have meals in a box coming coming here. What's happening though is we have startups here, we had Endy. Endy, ironically was just bought by Sleep Country, the traditional retailer that millennials are keeping away from, an actual brick and mortar store.

PC: Endy''s a mattress.

MS: Exactly, a mattress in a box. And you know some of these startups are collapsing. There was a shoe startup shoes.ca, I think it was that went bankrupt. They're starting to see that this isn't the perfect life also and some some of these startups are migrating back to brick and mortar stores, like Warby Parker is eyeglasses. They're starting stores. They're moving back to the stores. People actually want to be in a store. Now we're never going to see as many stores as we did you know a decade ago, that's done, but we will see stores still because people still want to see what they're buying. Feel it, spend some time with it. So I'm back to the word experience. It's called experiential retail and people are ready to go to a store, if they're going to get something out of it and it's a pleasant pleasurable experience.

PC: Help me parse, if there is a difference of these two terms, online shopping and direct to consumer. Are they not essentially the same thing?

MS: Yeah,.

PC: OK. But we call now generally direct to consumer goods. That's kind of how it's built. Yeah?

MS: Yeah that's e-commerce basically.

PC: OK. So the products that Rebecca Jennings used for experiment, consumer goods, the products themselves, why are they appealing? Like I get like they come directly to your house in an hour or whatever and they cost a lot of money. Beyond that, what makes these items so appealing?

MS: I think they're often marketed as being different. Sometimes they're not that different, but they're often marketed as being sustainable products made from sustainable materials. They're often marketed as more affordable than the same type of item that you would buy in a store because you don't have to go through layers of extra costs. And it comes, they like to use the phrase direct to consumer because it has this connotation that it's a direct cost also. And some websites actually go through the different costs and explain to people how they got to the price and so that's another way that it's marketed to these millennials, transparency. That's a big buzz word. Show me everything, be transparent and with all this transparency it comes back to, sometimes it doesn't look that different from what we used to buy a decade ago in a brick and mortar store.

PC: And in fairness, this is not about pitting generations against one another, Gen Xers, Baby Boomers also do more and more of this.

MS: I do think it's still the younger people who are doing more of it. I mean they just you know somebody told me recently that she wanted to go out and do some holiday shopping with her daughter and she said let's go do shopping and her daughter went straight to the computer. It's a different generation in terms of shopping. So much more shopping is being done by younger people at the computer because they're stuck at their computer. I mean they grew up on the computer much more than an older person, a baby boomer. And so that is why we're seeing so much, so many of these new products being marketed online and and very direct to consumer, as you said.

PC: So you know disruptions, where there are winners and losers all the time. Some make it, some don't. I don't know if you want to answer what companies specifically, you can if you want, but like who is benefiting from this disruption in the corporate world?

MS: In the corporate world, certainly a lot of investors are because it gets a buzz very quickly. This whole phenomenon of advertising in the subways because that's where and on the buses public transit, that's where these millennials are. So investors short term, I think long term some of these companies struggle and don't always stay in business that long and online retailers.

PC: So when you look into the future, what are you seeing?

MS: I think that both Millennials and Generation Z are are frugal. As Rebecca said in her article, she's a frugal person, essentially and so are a lot of other millennials and generation Z. They do not have the security of jobs that the older generation had. They went through recession. It was a tough recession and it was a long period of stagnation and they lived through that and so they won't have the means to pay for luxurious items. So they're still out there looking for these deals. They still like Amazon because they can get good prices and if these startups continue with the cheap chic and the good pricing, it's not going to change that much. It just might move more to traditional retail and be bought up by the Wal-Marts and the big guys that this generation try to stay away from. So a bit ironic.

PC: Marina, thank you for your expertise. I appreciate it.

MS: Thanks so much Piya.

PC: Marina Strauss is the retail reporter for The Globe and Mail. She was in our Toronto studio. Coming up in our next half hour, if you're using a new phone or tablet, laptop or PC that you unwrapped a Christmas to get on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, then my next guest says think twice. The argument for logging off the social media for good. I'm Piya Chattopadhyay in for Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

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Can this tech pioneer convince you to delete your social media accounts?

Guests: Jaron Lanier

JARON LANIER: everything for people. It's a truly malicious ugly force in the world.

PC: But the argument is: social media has some good too. And I'm thinking you know it allows people to organize and find like-minded people in order to find a community, campaign on issues that they care about. If we abandon social media wouldn't that be a setback for civil society?

JARON LANIER: Well first of all the benefits that you describe are real. I wouldn't deny that for a second, although I would describe them as being intrinsic to the internet not so much the social media companies that have come to take it over. What's happened with the social media companies is this good, which I absolutely believe is real. I absolutely believe in what you just said. But this good has been ruined. For instance if you look at the Arab Spring which are sometimes called the Twitter revolution or the Facebook revolution, it turned out that later ISIS got more mileage and better mileage out of using the same tools in the Arab Spring had. And the region turned to chaos and hasn't developed. It hasn't been pretty at all. A similar thing happened in the United States where the Black Lives Matter movement, which I found admirable, the data from all those people who were posting about Black Lives Matter and using it to organize was used by the algorithms and a totally blind way just to figure out who they could engage. And with the algorithms ended up doing was identifying and introducing to each other a whole world of American racists that had been latent. And it created this kind of rising neo Nazi, Ku Klux Klan revival that's just been horrible. That's this really darkened our nation.

PC: But do you attribute it like all of that to social media?

JARON LANIER: Well I don't want to oversimplify the world. I think we can say that social media brings out the worst in people, that it invented what is the worst is a different claim that would be harder to make, but that it brings out the worst. I think it is easy point to defend. I mean the thing is you see it all over the world, in both rich and poor countries and in countries with all kinds of different histories. You see it in the Rohingya crisis, you see it in rural India in Africa. But you also see the same phenomenon in Eastern Europe and even in Scandinavia now, all over the place. So when you see it everywhere you have to say 'Okay there's something going on here' that you can't explain in other ways. These political problems arise after Facebook becomes prominent, along with other degradations like a rise in teen suicide. I don't think this is something where you can say oh it's multifactorial and then just put it aside. You have to say 'No this is actually a dominant factor'.

PC: Let me ask you about one more. The hash tag Me Too. It's certainly galvanized a lot of people, namely women, to come together around the world to find support and lean on each other and arguably to out some of the perpetrators, or at least alleged perpetrators.

JARON LANIER: Yes. So if my theory is right we'll see a sort of reaction to Me Too. That'll be disproportionately powerful at some point. So I'm making a prediction and we'll see if it's accurate or not.

PC: Okay. Of course there are demographic differences about who's engaging in social media and who is not. And of course that leans towards young people they are some of the most immersed in social media. What impact do you think that is having on their perceptions about the world and their view of the future?

JARON LANIER: I have to correct you actually that was true at a certain point. I don't know 10 or 15 years ago. At this point the demographics were much more complex than that .and in fact some of the youngest demographics are quite skeptical about social media. When I'd visit a high school or an undergraduate campus ten years ago, and I would say the same things I'm saying now, it really sounded alien and bizarre to the students. Now I get cheered. I run into kids saying 'I won't date anybody who has an account in any of these things'. And you know there's that. And meanwhile there's actually quite a large component of the older demographics on Facebook in particular. I mean it varies per platform. So the demographics are really shifting and in a way that I think is positive. But can I just say one thing? I think a lot of what drives people to stay on these things is an almost accidental fear that if I'm not on these services, I'll just disappear. I won't know anybody, nobody will know about me. My life will disappear. So I write books, which leads me to be in your interview, and I'm seemed to be a successful writer. So far as I can tell I'm about as successful as I could reasonably expect to be. And yet I've never had these accounts. And it's possible that if you just get rid of this stuff you'll discover you really didn't need it.

PC: It's the old FOMO thing right. Fear Of Missing Out.

JARON LANIER: Yes. You can still text your friends. You can still make your own Web site. Remember doing that? You can still really do all the things you might want to do without using Facebook. And if you get off Facebook all of a sudden it takes much less time to get informed by the news and you get better informed that's been I think well demonstrated. So you know a lot of it is a groundless fear.

PC: Is the real idea behind asking people to delete their accounts, I mean are you actually expecting a mass exit. I mean the call to arms so to speak that you're making, do you think it's going to make a difference?

JARON LANIER: Well here's the analogy I would make: in the past society has faced a number of instances of mass addiction that led to mass destruction and we were able to reform ourselves despite there being massive commercial interests. So one example is public cigarette smoking. It used to be ubiquitous and now it's gone. Another example is drunk driving. It used to be cute. Now it's gone. And in both cases what happened is there were enough people, a minority probably, who simply didn't drink and or didn't smoke. And that small portion of society was enough to start a conversation. There were just some people who were outside of the addiction and could see it and could articulate that this addiction wasn't doing us any good. And everybody eventually responded to that reasonable argument. So in the same way here, my goal ultimately is just to have enough of a sliver of the society that can be outside of the addiction that we can have a rational argument. And I believe that once we can have a rational discussion, once we can have that discussion then I think I trust in people and I think that will start to make the same corrections that we did for cigarettes and alcohol. So there's a lot of people trying to do non-commercial versions of social media, most of which are better. You can write books and magazine articles, you can have meetings, you can give talks. You can do all these things and then you're actually more connected to people. I mean it's actually better when you do it that way.

PC: What responsibility do big tech and social media companies have in trying to solve some of the problems you've laid out?

JARON LANIER: As you know I believe we do have responsibility. And that's why I speak up so much. You know I'm a member of the loyal opposition in the tech world you might say. But at the same time society can't ask the tech platforms to solve all the problems because that makes the tech platforms too powerful and too central. So every time you petition Facebook to do something like get rid of fascists or cruelty or pornographers or whatever it might be, there are a whole host of evils, every time we ask them to be the authority that regulates these we're kind of making them more powerful and more central and more like an authoritarian government which I don't think is the direction we want to go in. And so my own feeling is that the solution is not so much asking the tech platforms to become the morality police but instead to build up societal structures like journals and even radio stations, if I might say, that can become the places that have quality standards that people can come to trust. And then those things can voluntarily have standards that are higher without requiring this giant global censorship effort. Facebook and similar companies and Google have had the effect of subsuming or reducing or crushing into obedience of the independent press. You know everybody has to sort of beg to be included in these algorithmic flows that are being calculated for totally different purposes for manipulation. And what we need to do is strengthen those institutions the newspapers, the schools, the journals so that they're powerful enough to stand up. And I think that's where we'll see more benefit than demanding that the platforms become more and more authoritarian.

PC: And are you optimistic that we can actually turn the ship around somehow?

JARON LANIER: Oh yes sure. I mean humanity has faced horrible problems in the past. We have to try to pull back from falling into irritable insanity in time to deal with climate change and other real issues that are threatening us. Can we do it? Yes I mean what's the point in thinking we can't? There's no benefit to that. So of course I'm optimistic. Criticism is optimism. Criticism is what you do when you think there's hope for improvement. So I'm absolutely optimistic and the more optimistic I am the more of a critic I'll be.

PC: I'm not going to give you 280 characters but I'm going to give you about 30 seconds to make the pitch to someone to get off social media right now. What are you going to say to them?

JARON LANIER: I'm going to say the only way you can know yourself is to experiment, to push yourself. You could go hiking in Tibet. That's one way. But even better way these days is to get off social media for six months. Get to know yourself, your friends, your world and then decide again. Then you'll know yourself then you have the standing to make a decision.

PC: Jaron Lanier, it's been great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

JARON LANIER: Oh hey thanks for being interested.

PC: Jaron Lanier is a scientist at Microsoft and the author of Ten Arguments for Deleting your Social Media Accounts Right Now. He was in Berkeley California.

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Dec. 26, 2018 episode transcript

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