"This Will Change Everything" is the eighth 🏷️#podcast-episode of the 📝Everything They Know podcast, hosted by 📝Ari Andersen.
Recorded in late March 2020, weeks into COVID-19 lockdown, this is a special one-on-one conversation with 📝Judy Estrin — the episode Ari released instead of a planned dark-future installment, on how the pandemic was deepening society's reliance on the very technologies the series critiques, and how to hold vigilance without abandoning the tools we suddenly needed.
Listen
Takeaways
From 📝Judy Estrin:
"There seems to be an irony of our time that one of the problems with the way we've responded to this crisis is not enough data. [...] There's so much data collected about us, [yet] the data we need to be collecting, we haven't been." [06:50]
"Now when we do the risk-benefit trade-offs, the benefit is going to be higher than it was two months ago in certain cases. So let's make that decision consciously, so that we can over time be modifying it." [17:01]
"Really what we want to be doing is physical distancing and social solidarity. We actually don't want to socially distance. And that's the reason why right now we need these tools — because otherwise we can't have the social solidarity." [17:30]
"If you can put off making a decision over the next couple of months, don't make it. Because any decision we make now is, one, out of a certain amount of fear, and two, with information that may not be valid." [27:45]
tl;dr — Crisis raises the benefit side of every surveillance trade-off, so the discipline is consciousness: accept what the moment requires deliberately and revisit it, watch the slippery slopes as emergency powers normalize, and refuse to make long-term decisions from fear.
Themes: conscious trade-offs · the data irony · surveillance normalization
Timeline
- 00:00 — Ari's cold open: the shelved dark-future episode; Harari's tipping-point warning
- 02:45 — "tucked in": privilege, safety, and being devastated daily
- 05:30 — the data irony: drowning in behavioral data, starved of testing data
- 08:30 — why now is not the time for the critique — and why it hasn't gone away
- 11:02 — the entrenchment worry: big companies get stronger; surveillance normalizes (Israel's emergency measure, Patriot Act echo)
- 13:05 — behaviors are what we still control; video-conference overreaction as example
- 15:30 — don't just accept each new surveillance ask; every device is a trade
- 17:01 — conscious risk-benefit; physical distancing, social solidarity
- 18:30 — how 9/11 and 2008 formed different generations; predicting is guessing
- 22:00 — innovation thrives on new needs, but capital retreats; biotech, health tech, systems shifts
- 25:30 — old sports games and Instagram dance classes: which behaviors persist is unknowable
- 27:45 — don't make long-term decisions in fear with invalid information
- 29:03 — gratitude for governors leading; podcasts that go deeper than the news cycle
- 31:08 — close: "it is important even with the turbulence, or more so because of the turbulence"