Young People, AI, and the Fight for Human Agency with Sam Hiner

Sam Hiner (0:00)

Believe it or not, there's hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions at this point, across the country who are talking about this online, about how they have AI friends, and how the AI understands them in a way that a human never could. At the end of the day, the major model providers, in the past, chatbots like GPT 4.0, were creating a risk for a lot of folks of falling down these pipelines and making them emotionally attached to the chatbots. That has improved in terms of the major model providers, even though it's not perfect. But we've also seen this whole business scream up of businesses like character.ai, Replica, and then just a million other chatbots that you'll see advertised on social media, which are explicitly designed for this purpose of romantic connection and which are trying to replace human connection.

Guy Kawasaki (0:46)

Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast, and we have a remarkably accomplished young person today. His name is Sam Hiner, and I got to tell you, Sam, you're one or two years out of college, right?

Sam Hiner (1:03)

That's right. One year out of college. Okay.

Guy Kawasaki (1:05)

So one year out of college, all I could think about was girls in cars, and you have significantly exceeded what I ever did one year out of college. Let me give you a little bit of a background here. He's the co-founder and executive director of the Young People's Alliance, and this is a bipartisan organization to help young Americans influence the politics of America. He began this in high school, believe it or not. You were overachieving in high school already, but that's a different discussion.

He and his co-founder Mick Tobin, they were named in the 2026 Forbes 30, under 30 social impact list. So Sam, let's just get started. I want to start with the Metta settlement. And Metta has agreed to pay up to 17 billion, which is kind of a flag right there is bullshit, right? Like up to a number is meaningless. What's really meaningful is the minimum they're going to pay, not the maximum they might pay. And they also agreed to change Instagram and Facebook and all that. So do you think this is a genuine kind of turning point or it's just smoke and mirrors?

Sam Hiner (2:24)

Yeah, that's a great question and appreciate you having me on. I think this is a real important moment because a lot of the things that were agreed to in that settlement is what advocates like the people who power YPA have been fighting for for years at this point. Like one of the biggest things in this settlement that was really exciting to me is to see that young people would now have control over their algorithms on social media. So on that home page, rather than seeing content in an order that is designed to keep you on the platform for as long as possible, you can turn that off and just see a basic feed and at the default for minors as well, I think that will be the option. Anything that gives young people more control over their digital experience seems very important right now to give our generation control over our lives again. Now, like you said, there's obviously some wrinkles to the settlement. We can't say everything's perfect. There's also questions around how this is going to be enforced and what the age assurance techniques will do. So this is definitely far better than anything we've seen in the past in terms of legal settlements. So it's been really exciting to see overall.

Guy Kawasaki (3:20)

Sam, if I were a betting man, I would say that if this preference can be set, meta is going to bury it about five screens deep, right? It's not going to be like on the home page, click here to turn off our algorithm. It's going to be in the settings, in security, in algorithms. It's going to be four or five levels deep, but maybe I'm just a bitter old man at this point.

Sam Hiner (3:46)

No, you're right. They're definitely great at doing that. And I think policymakers and the folks writing this settlement have responded to that energy from Big Tech from years where they've consistently been trying to work against the consumer, right? So what we've seen is in this settlement, they're saying that the algorithm has to be turned off by default for miners and they also have to issue regular notifications to people who have the algorithm on every few months, just explaining that the option is available because we've seen Meta do things like this in the past.