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Mind Your Money
A Social Media Fueled Bank Crisis, Perpetual Pessimism in Finance, & Tech's Layoff Cleanse
00:34:11
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome everyone, to the Mind you'd Money Podcast, a show by Public.com that examines the relationship between investing human behavior and happiness. We'll be digging into the hidden psychological forces that impact markets and your wallets while sharing timeless long term philosophies that will help you build and protect wealth. I'm your co host Doug Bonaparte, president at Bonafide Wealth.
- [00:22]
B
I'm Morgan Housel. I'm a partner at the Collaborative Fund and author of the book the Psychology of Money. I'm really excited about today's show. We're going to be talking about emotional contagion and what happens to your behaviors and everybody else's behaviors when somebody yells fire in a crowded Twitter thread.
- [00:37]
A
All right, so herd mentality can show itself in the face of fear, but also with irrational exuberance. We'll explain why FOMO can be the worst financial trait later on with our guest. But before all that, we have a couple of trending stories to banter about. The first is the wave of layoffs sweeping the tech industry. Hey Morgan, have you heard about all these jobs that are getting cut in the tech industry? Did you catch a headline about that?
- [01:00]
B
A few of them. One or two. You know, to me, the most interesting one of these was, was, I think it was in the Wall Street Journal a couple days ago. And it was the idea that a lot of these big tech companies hired up very highly paid, highly skilled, highly credentialed workers with nothing for them to do. And the reason that they did it is because they just wanted to hire these people so, so that their competitors could not get their hands on them. So there were these like very highly paid, like high six figure PhDs hired at Facebook or Google with nothing to do. And you can obviously tell why someone who is that qualified, who wants to put their skills to use and they get this big job offer and they're really excited and they get there and it's like wamp, wamp, nothing to do. I understand why a company would do that. I also understand why an employee would be so livid about this, especially if it's in a situation where they have some sort of retention bonus where they have to stick around twiddling their fingers for two years before they really have any option to leave.
- [01:57]
A
Well, I guess it explains all the day in the life of videos that you see on TikTok where you're wondering, you're wondering how Jim lasted from like, you know, go to the gym from 9 to 11 o', clock, you know, work in a spreadsheet. I Always. I always found those videos entertaining and cringy all at the same time. Time. But look, if you're, if you're meta, you're calling this the year of efficiency. And it looks like a lot of other tech companies are following that playbook. I mean, it's a great website if you want to check out. It's layoffs, AI, I believe, where you can get a running tally of the number of jobs in tech that have been got, have been lost this year and last year. And the number keeps going. But back to your remark about, you know, hiring all of these people with very large salaries. I mean, I won't lie. I mean, I see this a lot in my own practice. We have no shortage of clients at the firm that, you know, work in a lot of these companies. And luckily I can count on one hand that the folks have been laid off, which is great. It shows me that they are working and just not, you know, sitting on their hands here. But one thing I had noticed was a lot of the jobs that are getting cut are being posted again just at lower, lower salaries. So it's an interesting take on whether or not it not only validates your point here, but it's an interesting take on really how serious layoffs are if a good portion of those jobs are actually being rehired just at lower wages.
- [03:23]
B
There's also a very long history of like not much correlation between job postings and job hirings. It's very easy to post a job. It's much harder to actually hire that person and bring them on board. So I have a feeling we, we've seen this in other economic downturns, like a complete dislodgement between the number of postings and actual actually turning into jobs. It's always true in any industry, in any field. Like extremes lead to extremes. And when you had this just complete outlier hiring boom in 2020 and 2021, where it was just no holds barred, every time every type company flooded with money, what are they going to use that money for? Well, if growth is here and it's very competitive, let's just hire as many people as we can. Extremes lead to extremes. The crate, like, as crazy as that was, it's going to be crazy in the other direction on the way down. And, and usually on the reversion of the mean, you never just like end at some happy, like sane average. It's probably going to go in the other direction. It would not surprise me in the slightest if one year from now you start hearing stories about like major Staffing shortages at Amazon warehouses or something like that. I'm making that part up. But these things, these things usually go too far in the other direction when they unwind.
- [04:34]
A
So speaking of things going in that direction and thinking about psychology here, one of the themes of the show, a lot of people are waiting for the other shoe to drop right, right now it seems to be limited to tech and you know, you're seeing the Amazons and the metas of the world and I think indeed the other day just timestamped the show right there as far as, you know, another company. And again, that website will show you, you know, the whole track record here. I would love your take on, you know, is this, is this just feeding into that narrative that just around the corner from now is going to be this in mass layoff, the other shoe is going to fall. That's the trigger for the rece that everyone has been waiting for. It's the most like highly anticipated economic downturn that just hasn't come. How much of this, and I know we're guessing here, how much of this is really just, you know, psychological mind tricks and that's what they want. Like, hey, you're gonna come back to the office because your job very well might be on the line. Thanks tech industry for giving us, you know, the narrative to give to our employees to get their butts back in the building. Or is it just not gonna happen? Is this really just a play that won't pan out and will result in as did. We don't have enough workers to put stuff in boxes right now.
- [05:48]
B
I mean, I mean, effectively to the last point, that's what happened with a lot of big box retailers over the last decade. Not, not so much anymore. But if you go back to 2015, there were so many stories from Walmart and Target and those big box retailers of staff shortages and empty shelves at Walmart because they didn't have enough people to stock the shelves at night. And a lot of that was just like, that was the end of the cycle of like the calling of low wage workers where low wage workers were so expendable and they were just a dime a dozen. You could pay them six bucks an hour and just fire them whenever you wanted to. That was like the bottom of that story and it's changed now. And the irony, I think it's, I think there's still a lot of people who haven't accepted this yet because it is so divergent from the narrative of most of the last 20 years. But the biggest wage gains in percentage Terms by far over the last three or four years have come with the lowest wage workers in percentage terms, by dollars, of course, there's still a. There's still a large skew, but in percentage terms and also like job security at that point, it's, it's gone down a little bit. But if you were, you know, a cook for a restaurant or something like that, you probably have more job security now than you have in that field than at any other point in the last, like, 30 years. So there are these, like, changes of when it comes to me, it just always gets back to extremes, lead to extremes, and when you're at a turning point, it can take years for people to actually accept that that's what's happening. Because you're so ingrained in the previous.
- [07:12]
A
Narrative, I guess the extreme here, that is so different. And I guess you could argue all extremes are different in their own way. But you got to point to Covid here. You know, in terms of what that has done, particularly with labor, it's almost impossible not to notice its impact. Whether you're shopping at your favorite store or dining in your favorite restaurant, something has changed, and something has changed with the employees that work there. The type of service you get, for better or worse, it's just, to me, extremely noticeable, almost leading to this feeling of it's not the same. But the point I want to make is this. How is it, how is it helpful to look back at previous extremes and say, hey, that's what we're going to expect here? And I just can't bite down on that. I think we're just completely here in unexplored territory on the, on the whipsaw effect of what we had gone through over the last three years. And I'm still wrapping my brain around how this pans out. You know, okay, we're going to have a shortage of workers, but we now have to pay them X times more than we ever had before to go back to their, go back to those jobs. Are they really going to go back in the first place? I don't know. These are just my musings. I'm not expecting necessarily, necessarily an answer, but you wanna, you wanna comment on that, Morgan, while we get into the next topic?
- [08:36]
B
The. The last thing I'll say about this, what I remember pretty, pretty fondly from the aftermath of 2008 is people were so pessimistic and so scarred by the trauma of 2008 that until about 2015, there was a very large contingency of people who saw a deep Recession right around the corner. And sometimes the data, like, kind of backed them up, but a lot of times it didn't. It was just when you are hit that strongly, you. You're always looking for the next one. I mean, it's similar. Like, after September 11th, it was. For two years. After that, it was, when is the next terrorist attack? It was always right around the corner. So I think it's very natural whenever you're hit by something like that to see it.
- [09:13]
A
A terror alert system. We had a terror alert system. It was an orange day. Don't go on the subway.
- [09:19]
B
You know who had the best joke? Not. Not that this is a joking topic, but it's such a good comment about this. The comedian, Ron White. He said any terrorist warning system should be binary. It should be level one, find a helmet. Level two, put the helmet on. That actually tells you to do something. What do you do with an orange warning? Nobody knows what to do with that.
- [09:38]
A
You look around the subway car, you're in a little bit more, you know, like, literally no joke. That's, like, what we would do. I would talk to my wife like, hey, today's a yellow day. You see anything, you're feeling all right. And looking back at it, it's like, that's, you know, that's how they win, you know, striking. I don't think that system necessarily did anything good for anyone anyway, Shifting. Shifting out of that. There seems to be this notion that, you know, Americans are getting gloomier in terms of outlook. It's becoming a gloomier outlook for their personal finances. And, you know, we could look at a bunch of data points to suggest that this is the case. Racking up credit card debt. We're back to where we were, if not beyond, in 2019. There seems to be just, in general, you know, some pretty bad sentiment out there in terms of, you know, the state of things. I think whether you're parents of young kids, you're completely drained. If you're folks that are being asked to go back into the office after, you know, working really hard through the pandemic, you don't quite understand that. I know we'll probably think about this from, you know, our cohorts standpoint, but why do you think it's so. It's so gloomy out there. What. What's wrong with everyone? Their unemployment, you know, still record lows. The economy hasn't, you know, completely fallen apart yet, aside from, you know, maybe some cracks in the banking system. Shouldn't. Shouldn't we be happy? Shouldn't we Be grateful that we still have jobs and we can hopefully save and invest. Why is everyone so bummed?
- [11:08]
B
I think there's. I think there's. It's roughly true that there's never been a time that consumers in mass felt great about their finances, whatever. Like, there's always volatility in how people feel, but it tends to go from I feel bad to I feel really bad. And I think that's an important point here. There's never been, like, this boom, like, maybe the late 1990s. But even then, I think even if you look at these polls in the late 1990s or the 1950s or periods that we associate with, like, the golden age of. Of of economic growth, you're not going to find large groups of people who say, I feel amazing about my finances. We think that in hindsight, because we compare 1999 to 2008, and then we look back to 1999 and say, God, everybody must have been so happy. But I think if you actually look at it, most people don't feel that great about their finances most of the time. I think the reason why is because there is no such thing as an objective level of wealth or, like, an objectively good income. Everything is relative to other people. It's just, how much money do I have relative to that person who I'm looking at my neighbor, my coworker, my brother, whatever it might be. And I think, so as long as there's some degree of economic inequality, you're going to have half the country that feels like they're falling behind because relative to the other half, they are. And so it's less about, like, how well are people doing, and it's more about relative to other people. And I bring that up because you mentioned an interesting thing, that credit card debt is back to 2019 levels. The other way to spin that is credit card debt has been flat for four years, which is amazing. But if we go. But. But when you frame it, I was like, oh, we're back to a new high. Like, well, there's a couple different ways to look at that. So I think a lot of these things, it's not to minimize economic hardship, which has always been here and always will be. But it's just a lot of these things are more psychological than they are analytical.
- [12:52]
A
Absolutely. So should we. Should we be happier? I mean, should we be grateful that, you know, mortality in birth rates is the lowest it's ever been, that we all have supercomputers in our hands that are able to give us dopamine? Hits on demand. You know, we talked about, and are going to talk about social media's role in all of these things. What do you think we do to escape that, that trap, that treadmill of constantly looking to our next door neighbor or looking at life through the lens of an Instagram filter? Because I feel, I feel like that, you know, you know, there's some construct here where, you know, if I do well in business, let's say I get a new client or there's something I've been working hard on and you close the deal, you know, I'll be like, all right, well, why weren't there two deals, right? Why, why didn't I close on three? Is that, you know, and you write about this all the time, right? You know, what's enough? You know, and here literally after closing a deal and having a good thing and my wife being like, yeah, that's fantastic. I'm like, no. She's like, why are you bummed about that? I'm like, one, we got to pay taxes, and two, you know, you know, why? Where's the more, you know, we need this to go, to go forward here, Unlike looking back to like 99 or the 90s, well, look how great things were. What, what do you do, like, what do you do to be like, all right, I got to stop looking at, you know, Bob next door?
- [14:15]
B
Well, I think, I think it's important to point out that for the whole economy, it will never go away. I mean, look at like the mass GDP growth, economic growth, improvements in well being since the industrial age, the last 180, 190 years, it's been insane. It's remarkable, like how much we've grown for almost 200 years now. The reason that there has been consistent economic growth for two centuries is because for two centuries and longer, you've had people who wake up every morning and feel like they're falling behind, feel like they're inferior, feel like they're not doing as well as the next guy. So they need to innovate, they need to work harder, all of that. Like, it's easy to look back and glorify it of just like, oh, like capitalism, like innovation is great. The reason that occurs is because people feel inferior to other people. And that will always be the case. So at the big economic level, it's never going to be the case. And I would bet heavily that 50 years from now, two things will be true. The average American will be way wealthier in real terms than they are today, and they will not feel any better for it. They may feel worse for it. I think that's always, it's an easy bet to make because that's always been the case and they just think it always will be. What do I do? Individually, it's much easier to talk about this stuff and say don't care about other people, do the internal benchmark than it is to actually do it. One thing that I think does help, that's a good reminder. It's a good reminder for your humility is just the idea that nobody is thinking about you as much as you are. Nobody cares about you as much as you do. Nobody's thinking about your car or your house or your clothes as much as you are. And when you realize that everyone else is just worried about themselves, then your, your aspirations to impress other people decrease a little bit. It's always going to, there's always going to be some of that. But when you realize that everyone inside of like I think everyone naturally assumes when you walk into a room or you go to a party that everyone instantly is looking at you and sizing you up and like they're not. They're worried about themselves, they're thinking about themselves. And that idea spread to a broad level is the only thing that's kind of worked for me.
- [16:06]
A
You, you, you stole my follow up right there. Because it literally, and maybe it was because you wrote it and I'm recalling something that you did here. Nah, it can't be that. It was. When you do go to that cocktail party or you're in that social interaction, you have all of these concerns and all of this anxiety that someone who you've never met in your life before is going to think a certain way about you. And the reality is the. They don't know anything about you at all. It's a clean slate. It's an opportunity to take a conversation in any direction. But there you are looking at maybe what they wear or the watch that's on their wrist or something that makes you then feel a certain way about yourself. And it's in escape and it's inescapable. Right. And then after the party, you go on Instagram and find their account or their, their Facebook page and you know, further that process of, oh man, I'm going to feel that much worse. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to feel gloomy the more information that's kind of just, you know, thrown at your face through things like social media. So having said that, I think now might be a great time to get into the guest portion of our show here. On the Mind you'd Money podcast is Amit Goldenberg, Assistant professor at Harvard Business School and a trained psychologist. Amit's work focuses on the role of emotions and social interactions, specifically in the context of social and political issues. We're going to dig in on the concept of digital emotion contagion and how a viral panic on Twitter could have helped fuel the recent banking crisis, which some are calling the first Twitter fueled bank run. Amit, thank you for joining us.
- [17:41]
C
Thank you for having me.
- [17:43]
A
Great. My first question to you is around that bank collapse. The 48 hour collapse of Silicon Valley bank helped display how social media and the emotion of crowds could have real life implications for the financial system. You've thoroughly researched this idea of digital emotion contagion. Do us a favor for everyone listening today. Can you break down this concept?
- [18:07]
C
Yeah. So in 2014, Facebook did this really cool experiment with 680,000 people. They basically took half of these people and stopped showing them any positive content. They saw only 90% negatively valence content, so negative emotions. And then half of the people saw only positive content, no negative content. And what they tested was how did that change the content that people produced? And what they found was that by reducing the negatively balanced content that people see, they basically are producing less negative content themselves and the same for positive content. And that's kind of represent the essence of what digital emotion contagion is. We expose to emotions online, on social media and all sorts of digital outlets. And that not only impacts how we kind of process the world, but also our affective states and the emotions that we tend to express. Then later on when we produce content, when we write, write posts, or when we share content. And that's basically the essence of it.
- [19:20]
B
One thing that I found so interesting about that study is my understanding is that the correlations went both ways. So the people who got positive content that was shown to them, they produce positive content. What's interesting to me about it is that I've always thought, and it seems obvious that negative content gets people stirred up more than positive content does in the other direction. So talk about the, the imbalance between what negative information does to our emotional contagion versus positive information.
- [19:50]
C
Yeah, you're absolutely right. There's two things to keep in mind. One, emotional content leads to more engagement, more sharing. But two, people are kind of evolutionarily tuned to focus on negative information. Think about kind of our ancestors who historically were looking for information to help them understand the world. And negative information provides much more accurate or much more important information about Risks in one social environment. And that tendency to sort of attend more to negative content is what we call negativity bias. And when we kind of were wired in, no one have ever said that we will have endless amounts of negative information available to us all the time in sort of large quantities. And so this kind of inherent tendency to attend more to negative content is now amplified in this world in which there's kind of endless, not only there's endless negative emotion, but there's algorithms who sort of recognize your interest in negative information and will produce more and more of that type of information for you to be satisfied. And so, yes, people are more likely are influenced by emotions in general, but specifically on social media, they're much more likely to be engaged by negative content. And there's a lot of really great research on that topic.
- [21:23]
B
I've always framed it as pessimism sounds like somebody trying to help you, but optimism sounds like a sales pitch. Like pessimism is hard to look away from because it's like, oh, there's a risk I need to respond to. But optimism, even if it's not someone trying to sell you something, it's just easier to ignore than a threat that might be there. And I think that gets really into what happened recently with Silicon Valley bank, where effectively, people started yelling fire on Twitter and it was like tens or hundreds of millions of people on Twitter who heard this and responded in one day. And that's how Silicon Valley bank goes from more or less. People can debate this. It was healthy ish on Wednesday and out of business on Friday. It just happened so fast. One thing that I've. I've thought about here that I'd like to get your take on is the idea that why it was so potent at SVB is because so many of the clients were from the same social groups. They belonged to the same discord channels and the same WhatsApp group. They were such a tightly bound community of tech entrepreneurs that, that when somebody yelled fire, so to speak, it just ripped through that community in a way that would be so much harder, not impossible, but harder to occur at Wells Fargo or Citigroup that has a much more disparate clientele.
- [22:35]
C
Yeah, that's really interesting. You know, there's two types of contagion. One is called simple contagion. So all you need is one exposure to get to get the whatever you're getting. And complex contagion is a little bit more complex. You need more than one kind of exposure to get the thing that you are going to get and emotions are highly impacted by complex contagion. And the thing about complex contagion is that it spreads much faster in clustered communities because everybody is exposed to similar stimuli and they react to similar stimuli. And so you get a lot of multiple responses from a closed community to the same stimuli. So in a context in which emotions spread, in this case panic, these clustered communities are much more likely to lead to like a faster spread of emotions. Absolutely.
- [23:36]
A
So this is the question that I'm most excited to ask, and it really has to do with taking a look back in time to 2008, the great financial crisis, a little bit of vibes here in the last few weeks. But I can't help but to think about what things would have been like if the social media apparatus of today existed back in 2008. I keep coming to the conclusion that things would have been very, very bad if we had the Twitter up today and we had social media of today. But I'm curious from you, your take on that, do you think that what we have today would have led to something far more damaging? Would it have been something, what would the positive things have been if we had social media like we do today back in 2008?
- [24:24]
C
Yeah, that's a fascinating question. I think a lot about this today, you know, as well, sort of what, what are some of the thinking back about events in history and how would they look differently if we had social media? So there's a few things that we know, right? It accelerates the speed as more as. As Morgan was saying, basically things happen much, much quicker than they have, than they used to happen. So that's one thing that would have happened. I think the crash would have been probably quicker and maybe, maybe stronger potentially. But there's another aspect of social media that is really interesting, which is emotions with moralized content tend to get a lot of attention on social media. What people sometimes call moral outrage. And moral outrage could have played, played a somewhat overall in 2008, but could have played a much more interesting role if it was happening with social media content. So this is when we're thinking of moralized content. We're thinking of anger towards banks, a much stronger pushback on kind of government officials who kind of intervened and helped the banks.
- [25:42]
A
And.
- [25:45]
C
This is for the public to decide whether more kind of accountability by social media outrage would have led to, would increase or decrease the chance that the government would kind of intervene in the way that it intervened in 2008. So it's about the speed, but also about the potential solutions to the Crisis that I think would have looked very differently.
- [26:09]
B
I've thought about a lot.
- [26:11]
A
Sorry, Morgan, didn't mean to catch up. It's very interesting you say that I was part of some Twitter spaces as this was unfolding. And some people, like Bill Ackman come in and provide their commentary as to what solution they think would. Would take place here. And, you know, I guess I'll pay bill some credit here because what he had thought should be done was indeed the response and whether it was novel of him to say, like, hey, I think that I heard the similar response from some other, you know, titans of finance here. But I do find it interesting to your point about there being perhaps solutions that can be offered a lot more quickly or that you can get at least some group think together using the social networks that we have today that otherwise didn't exist. But I still can't help but to think that the panic, the fear, the negative sentiment would ultimately have drowned out, you know, any kind of positive feelings or solutions that are coming your way. Again, screaming, you know, fire in a crowded theater, or in this case a crowded Twitter would have likely have been, you know, the catalyst for things to get worse.
- [27:15]
C
Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, there's. There's been a recent work on how do collective response to kind of traumatic events together. For example, there's a paper by Bernard Remy, who's a famous kind of Belgian collective psychology scholar, looking at how Twitter reacted in France to a terror attack that happened in 2019. And what you see is something really interesting at the beginning. You see a really strong wave of anger, anxiety, and a lot of strong emotions. And maybe that would have been enough to sort of sink in the whole system in a much deeper hall than it happened. But then what happens a few days after is there's a huge shift towards positivity within the collective and sort of a push towards kind of social support. Now, this is a very optimistic, I guess, view on what could have happened. And, you know, we could. We, I'm sure that we will have, you know, in the future the experience to see how these things react. But one could be also hopeful that sort of these collective systems in which people kind of interact maybe also can turn into tools in which better coordination happens, more support. You know, we've seen this a lot in Covid. People always expected that social media would just go down to new levels of anxiety and fear, and that actually didn't happen. There's a lot of people who felt a lot more fear and anxiety, but a lot who kind of did not and sort of used social media for positive aspects. So one could always be hopeful of the outcomes of social media interactions.
- [29:01]
B
I often think too, what if we had social media during September 11th and some people did have social media in 2008, it was very nascent. But 9 11, there was nothing. Of course it was. We were just watching the news on tv. And one thing that I recall, people might disagree with this. I don't think it's black and white, but I do recall a lot like a tremendous surge of patriotism in the days, weeks and months after 9 11. I remember, I think it was September 12th. Congress literally held hands on the steps of the Capitol and saying God bless America, Republicans, Democrats. So I do think there is a long history of whenever there is a collective event that's very traumatic, people can bind together and bond together and have the sense of positivity. I just wonder if we had Twitter and Instagram on 9 11, would that sense of patriotism and coming together have been amplified or would it have turned the other direction and it would have descended into finger pointing?
- [29:58]
C
Well, I guess, look, I'm the wrong person to ask this. You know, I'm originally from Israel and Israel has these experiences much more frequently. And as I can tell you what's happening, which is a much stronger outrage, sometimes a lot of social support and sometimes some unity, but a lot more outrage and a lot more call to action to sort of reduce the this outrage and a lot stronger push for leaders to sort of get solutions done in a, in a quick way which sometimes ends up in nice places and other times end up in less nice places.
- [30:41]
B
One last question. To me, I'm just curious what tips you have for Doug and I for individuals to anyone watching this of how to limit or tweak their social media usage to prevent themselves from falling down these outrage traps and being influenced by others behavior.
- [30:56]
C
Okay, so first of all I want to say both of you are kind of Twitter public figures and I want to say that the risk of negative emotions spreading, so public figures on Twitter express relatively comparably less negative emotions. But for each amount of negative emotions that they spread, these emotions are much more likely to be shared. So public figures needs to be even more careful than kind of non public figures on social media in expressing negative emotions if they don't want these emotions to spin out of out of hand. So that that would be a private tip for both of you in the realm of kind of what's the solution to the problem. There's a Huge debate in this literature on two potential solutions. One is a filtering solution. So people need to do a really good job in filtering the type of people and the type of content that they see. They. We need to develop tools that will provide people with information about the degree of emotionality that, that the content that they see have to help them kind of be more aware of, of, of the content and maybe then be less affected by it. I think my personal belief is that at the end of the day, people will get habituated to these tools and will go back to their kind of normal routine of attending more to negative content. The other alternative is filtering, right? Finding ways to filter rather than provide people with information. So people need to do nothing, unfollow people who make them feel unhappy. We need to develop tools that would help people filter emotional content and show them only the positive side. You can already see the irony in that side as well, which is we're gonna get exposed to these, like, endless pictures of cats and happy babies, but we're not. We're not gonna know anything about the world. And so I don't. I don't really know what the best solution. I think the solution is probably kind of a mix of both some filtering and some information on the content that one is seeing to help people get a little bit more of a balanced diet of emotional content online.
- [33:21]
A
So I think that's really interesting, specifically with Twitter, in light of Elon Musk's acquisition of it, we're promised all of these tools to tweak the algorithm or curate the content the way we want. You brought up a lot of good points. I find myself blocking and muting accounts that, you know, either a disrespectful or maybe don't make me feel the way that I want to feel. Namely Morgan's account that's been blocked and muted for, for quite some time now. But all of that, I want to tell you that this has been really a wonderful conversation in understanding what's going on here with social media in light of a, you know, I hope minor banking crisis. So big thanks to you. This is Amit Goldenberg, assistant professor at Harvard Business School and trained psychologist. I hope everyone was able to learn a lot from our questions and answers with him here today. Thanks again, Amit.
- [34:09]
C
Thank you so much. Been a pleasure.