♪♪ [ Cheering ] [ Clock ticking ] -Ow.

♪♪ -Tonight on "Retro Report," understanding the present by revealing the past.

First... -Even the CEO of Apple thinks he's on his iPhone too much.

-...can social media's grip on us today be explained by psychological experiments from the 1950s?

-Dr. Skinner, what are you doing with this pigeon?

-How protests by black athletes today are connected to those of the past.

-There's no such thing as staying in your own lane in sports.

You're engaged in politics.

♪♪ -Then, the Wall Street sexual harassment scandal that silenced a generation, and Florida's giant-snake problem.

-Oh, my God.

That's on our street?

-Plus, Andy Borowitz, humorist for "The New Yorker" magazine.

-Election season is here, and one out of every three Americans is currently running for office.

♪♪ -I'm Celeste Headlee.

-And I'm Masud Olufani.

This is "Retro Report" on PBS.

-They have stunned the world.

-Time's up!

-An unusual... -More secrets exposed.

♪♪ ♪♪ -At a time when social media is increasingly taking over our lives, Facebook has become an emblem of technology run amok.

It's been pilloried in the press for manipulating users and has come under investigation for sharing personal data.

Social media's power over consumers didn't happen by chance, but by design.

-A theory pioneered decades ago by the influential psychologist B.F. Skinner lies at the root of today's attention economy where people are manipulated with the same technique Skinner developed to teach rats to press levers, cats to play the piano, and pigeons to face off in Ping-Pong.

But could the research that led to social media's power over us also help us to escape its grip?

♪♪ Over the last decade... -iPhone is like having your life in your pocket.

-...technology has reshaped how we interact with the world.

-One third of humanity uses Facebook at least once a month.

If Facebook were a country, it would be the largest in the world.

-It's also reshaped our own lives.

-More families are texting each other while inside the same house instead of actually talking.

-Even the CEO of Apple thinks he's on his iPhone too much.

-Some people are so addicted to technology and their devices, they're now turning to rehab.

-But to understand how this technology hooks us, we need to look back to a different time.

-Conquest -- the search for new knowledge about our universe, our world, and ourselves.

♪♪ What is behavior?

What makes a man love, gamble, write a sonnet?

In this laboratory, scientists seek answers to those questions using pigeons.

-It was 1959, and an unassuming scientist was about to tell a nation about a remarkable discovery.

-Dr. Skinner, what are you doing with this pigeon?

-I'm getting ready to demonstrate a fundamental principle of behavior.

This pigeon is hungry, and I can give it food just by pressing this switch.

This operates a small food dish back at the square opening in the wall.

In that way, I can select parts of its behavior and make it do practically anything I like.

-For decades, behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner had been experimenting with pigeons and rats to see what he could make them do, but rats pressing levers and pigeons pecking disks was just the start.

-If it goes past one pigeon, the other pigeon can eat, and if it goes the other way, the other pigeon eats.

-That's remarkable.

-Of course, we're not interested in behavior because it's amusing or dramatic.

We want to study its causes and find out how to change it.

-One of those techniques he found that was particularly useful in shaping behavior was the variable reward.

-The things we do in everyday life don't always pay off, and they don't always not pay off.

It isn't simple all or none.

We study that in the case of the pigeon by arranging various schedules or systems of payoff.

-He found that if you don't know what is gonna come down that chute in terms of a reward, and you don't know when it's going to come, you will stay there pressing the button and pulling the lever.

-The key, Skinner discovered, was making the payoff unpredictable.

-That element of uncertainty, that perfect sweet spot, that balance of, you know, predictability yet uncertainty -- that is the most addicting reinforcement schedule.

-To help make his case that humans could be controlled in the same way, Skinner pointed to casinos.

-People gamble because of the schedule of the reinforcement that follows.

-In Skinner's time, people found a lot of what he said for cultural and historical reasons to be very creepy.

The idea that we could be controlled was coming right on the heels of this image of sort of communism and that we could be all turned into little drones executing the commands of others, and so people were repelled by it.

-I come back to the old question, the old objection -- quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Who is going to guard our guardians?

Who is going to modify the people who are going to modify us?

-In the climate of the '70s, '80s, and even '90s, it would've been a very dubious proposition to call yourself and advertise yourself as a behavior designer.

-But that's not the case today.

-I'd like to share with you a design pattern that companies use to build habit-forming products.

It's called the HOOK.

-I decided to dive deeper into the psychology of what makes products habit-forming hoping that I could build a habit-forming product.

-Nir Eyal now works as a behavioral designer helping companies figure out what kind of behavioral techniques will attract users and keep them.

-What we find is that habit-forming products have what's called a hook designed into the product.

If we feel lonely, we check Facebook.

If we're uncertain, we Google.

All of these things fundamentally cater to an emotional itch, an emotional discomfort.

What we want to do is to find the pain points in users' lives so that we can solve that problem for them.

-But behavioral design goes beyond simply finding and easing an emotional itch.

The hooks built into these products are also intended to keep users coming back, and here, Skinner's discoveries are key.

-The connection is to make something interesting.

It needs to be variable.

It has to be -- there has to be some kind of mystery, some kind of uncertainty.

Instagram is a great example of a product that has a fantastic hook built in.

The internal trigger is when you're seeking connection.

The action is to open the app.

The variable reward is to scroll the feed.

Over time, you're changing your habits to use this product.

-There are certain possibilities, and there's certain uncertainties, right?

So something like Twitter really has that feel of, you never know when a pellet is gonna come down the chute, and the same with Facebook.

You log on, and you just keep scrolling to see, like, when am I gonna get a little hit?

I think it is useful to think about them as some kind of digitally enhanced Skinner Box.

-Loren Brichter is one reason Twitter is so addictive.

He developed the code for the now-ubiquitous gesture known as "pull to refresh."

-It was literally five lines of code.

I put it in, and it was done.

Like, that was pull to refresh, and then people starting putting it in everything.

In my mind, I did it because it was a more natural gesture.

Like, it was a little bit more ergonomic.

Some people likened it to a slot machine, which makes a ton of sense in hindsight.

-Today, there's growing concern that technology companies have gone too far in their attempt to keep users glued to their screens, and some of the industry's leaders are speaking out.

-The short-term dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.

-It's not about giving you all this freedom.

It's about sucking you in to take your time.

-I mean, it's exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with because you're exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.

-Skinner's daughter, Julie Vargas, says her father believed that behavioral psychology could be a force for good if it was used in the right way.

-My sister's school had Father's Day, and what he saw was the teacher giving a lesson and then giving a worksheet, and some of them were doing it quickly.

Others were clearly not knowing what to do.

And that one turns.

So he came home, and he said, "I'm making a teaching machine."

-One of the practical applications of laboratory work in the field of behavior theory is the teaching machine.

-These machines are now being used to teach everything from telling the time to advanced physics.

Satisfaction from achievement is a powerful human reinforcer.

-He had an ethics, you know -- an ethics of collective human flourishing that depended on making the right choices rather than ones that would deplete us and keep us in the corner of the Skinner Box pressing the button.

-Vargas says her father would be appalled by the way his discoveries are being used by some technology companies today.

-He would be horrified at how much control these little devices, or the interaction, has over particularly the young people of our society.

-Just because something is potentially addictive doesn't mean we don't have control.

We're not freebasing Facebook.

We're not injecting Instagram here.

-Eyal says that many behavioral designers are actually trying to improve users' lives.

-I'll give you example after example.

Duolingo helps us learn languages.

We've got apps that I use every day when I go to the gym that helps me exercise, apps to help us stop smoking, apps that help us stop using our technology are all using these behavioral design tactics.

-But in the end, the solution to help us overcome our addiction to technology may not come from an app.

Instead, it may be from understanding one of Skinner's most important realizations -- knowing you're being controlled by something might be the first step to breaking its grip.

-Science liberates you to the extent that you now understand why things are happening and when they're going to happen.

Knowing what in your environment is controlling your behavior lets you change that environment and change your own behavior.

-Loren Brichter is among those now thinking more deeply about his environment and the ones he created.

-On some levels, it was -- like, I thought I did, like, good work.

But on other levels, like, I think that work led to bad things happening, and they're all part of this big thing that, like, led to this massive shift in, you know, human culture.

There's no undo button.

I mean, all technology is like Pandora's Box.

You can't predict what making any of this stuff is gonna do.

♪♪ -The National Football League has kicked off its 100th season with a lot of fanfare -- memories of great catches, wild finishes, and a lifetime of entertainment for many Americans.

But the sport has a more recent legacy and one the league may not be as quick to talk about.

Beginning with Colin Kaepernick, some NFL players chose to kneel during the national anthem.

They knelt in protest of police shootings of African-Americans, and they were immediately criticized for suddenly bringing politics into the sports arena.

-But sports has always been a reflection of where we are as a country, and Kaepernick's Take a Knee movement was a direct result of previous protests by black athletes.

He was not only inspired by the two sprinters who raised their fists at the Olympics in 1968, but he was even advised by the very same person.

-Track fans gather for the 220-yard dash.

-I was a senior at San Jose State when Tommie Smith came in as a freshman.

He was the greatest sprinter that I've ever seen.

-Smith begins to pour it on.

He literally flies toward the tape.

-Harry Edwards first met Tommie Smith as his classmate in the 1960s, but a couple of years later, Edwards got a job at San Jose State and became Smith's teacher.

-And in those courses, I talked about, here's where sport intersects with education.

Here's where it intersects with religion.

Here's where it intersects with politics.

-The athletes of the 1960s are much different than the generation that preceded them.

You saw things like Lew Alcindor becoming Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Muhammad Ali and refusing to go to Vietnam.

-The real enemies of my people are right here, not in Vietnam.

♪♪ -As the 1968 Summer Olympics approached, Edwards, Smith, and fellow sprinter John Carlos became determined to bring the plight of black America to the international arena.

-The men's 200 meters -- another event dominated by the black American sprinters.

-Up until then, the prevailing notion was that black concerns with civil rights stops at the water's edge.

We don't air our dirty laundry before the world.

Our churches were being bombed, our little girls being killed, our leaders being shot down while they had black athletes going abroad as goodwill ambassadors to sell the American system.

-People forget that those Olympics happened just a few months after Martin Luther King had been assassinated.

-All over America, black ghettos exploded in rage and grief.

-We want to send the message that we are determined to fight this struggle.

We may not be able to get to the forum in the United Nations, but we can get to the Olympic podium.

[ Cheers and applause ] -It was widely interpreted as a provocative Black Power gesture, and in retaliation, Smith and Carlos were thrown off the team and told to get out two days later.

-The image of Smith and Carlos raising their fists during the national anthem sparked immediate public backlash.

-There was a tremendous reaction.

The death threats came rolling in.

I was fired from my teaching position at San Jose State.

-Do you think you represented all black athletes in doing this?

-I can say I represented black America.

-It wasn't simply a reflection of black militancy.

It was pointing to the duality of being asked to perform on the world's stage as good, loyal Americans in a society that had blood on its hands for the assassination of the foremost articulator of African-American claims to democracy and freedom.

-You'll never see me standing up until this thing, the national anthem, represents me.

-Right on.

-Right now, it doesn't represent me.

-And so in a way, that's the kind of distillation of the position that African-American athletes had been in from the very beginning.

-Jackie Robinson told me that he didn't stand for the national anthem anymore.

He didn't say the Pledge of Allegiance.

He understood that even after the price that he paid in turning the other cheek, keeping quiet, which was not in his character, very little progress had been made.

-I think they've got to do whatever they possibly can, but we cannot exclude any means except violence.

-He was the first one to make it clear to me that progress is a very, very tricky kind of a concept.

At one level, it's a lot like profit.

It comes down to who's keeping the books.

-Ever need to rent a car fast?

-♪ Nobody does it better ♪ ♪ Hertz leads the others by far ♪ -By the late 1970s, the rise of celebrity culture and then an influx of endorsement money ushered in a new generation of black athletes whose profitability and wide appeal was contingent on avoiding politics.

-O.J.

Simpson -- he stated everybody can't be Martin Luther King, and he was not wrong.

If Larry Bird doesn't have to stand up for every hick in French Lick, Indiana, or every poor white guy or woman in Appalachia, why should O.J.

have to be representative of every black person who's struggling under racism in this society?

Are we really talking about exchanging black orthodoxy for white supremacy?

-Yo, Mike, what makes you the best player in the universe?

Money's got to be the shoes.

Shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes.

You sure it's not the shoes?

-I'm sure, Mars.

-What about the shoes?

-Michael Jordan's arrival as the most identifiable American on the planet, possibly -- it's not coincidental he achieved that level of global stardom as being among the least political, least outspoken African-American athletes in that tradition.

-It became possible for somebody like Charles Barkley to say... -I am not a role model.

-That actually became part of a commercial.

"Don't expect me to do anything or be anything for your child.

I'm just here to dine sumptuously at a table where somebody else's sacrifices and struggles made it possible for me to do so."

-In 1990, when Harvey Gantt ran against noted segregationist Jesse Helms in North Carolina, Jordan refused to weigh in and refused to endorse Gantt.

-♪ If I could be like Mike ♪ -♪ If I could be like Mike ♪ -The dictates of the market were more important than the dictates of civil rights, at least in his own personal calculations.

That really became the mold for a generation of African-American athletes.

-Game ball.

-Whoo!

-Game day, baby.

Let's dominate.

-Coach Bill Walsh.

[ Cheers and applause ] -In 1985, Harry Edwards got a call from Super Bowl champion coach Bill Walsh, who was also a San Jose State alumnus.

Walsh knew of Edwards' history of social activism, and, thinking outside the box, he felt Edwards could be a valuable asset to his team.

-He said, "Where I want you more than anywhere else is in the locker room.

We have a demographic transition coming where you have a majority blacks on the field.

I want these athletes to be aware and conscious of what's going on not just in football but beyond so that we can be ahead of things when they develop."

-Over the last three decades, Edwards has been a sounding board for 49ers players grappling with the intersection of sports and society, including a dynamic young quarterback named Colin Kaepernick, who led the team to the 2013 Super Bowl.

-Colin Kaepernick asked me for books to read.

I said, "Yeah, I can give you some books to read."

He was just another athlete who would come to me and say, "Doc, there's something I want to talk to you about."

-This country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all, and it's not happening for all right now.

-Colin Kaepernick says he is ready for the backlash after refusing to stand during the national anthem.

-Sports and politics collided when Kaepernick refused to stand for the national anthem, he says, to highlight black oppression.

-I think that what's happened now with the current generation of athletes is that we have been inundated with video of people being killed by the police under at best questionable circumstances, and we've seen it again and again and again and again and again.

-Put your hand behind your back right now.

-I can't breathe.

I can't breathe.

I can't breathe.

I can't breathe.

I can't breathe.

-We now know that Tamir Rice was killed by one shot to the left side of his abdomen.

-Hey, boss.

-You [bleep] move, I swear to God.

-Hey, boss.

[ Gunshots ] -There's always been pressure, particularly from African-American communities, saying that people who had a platform should speak out on behalf of those communities.

-Between about 1974 and about 2008, there was no ideology framing up the era.

There was no movement.

At the end of the day, it's inevitable that these waves will come along.

Why?

Because it is embedded in the very cultural and historical fiber of American society.

-You cannot disrespect our country, our flag, our anthem.

You cannot do that.

-There's a political calculation, and there's a political profit to be reaped whether it is the deliberate or unintentional misinterpretation of this dissent to be anti-American.

-...to say get that son of a bitch off the field right now.

Out, he's fired.

He's fired!

-I hate you!

-American-made!

-American-made!

-American-made!

-Furious football fans are posting videos online burning all things Kaepernick.

-Whenever we've seen figures articulate a critique of the society, especially African-American athletes, dissent is interpreted as disloyalty.

-Let's be clear.

That's what they are.

They're arrogant young millionaires.

-There's a presumption that black people are not supposed to be at the tier of society where they are, and they should be grateful that they've been allowed to exist on that tier.

-During a meeting between players and owners last week, Bob McNair said if the league didn't stop the protest, it would be like, quote, "inmates running the prison."

-The audience do not reflect the 80% blacks on the field.

I mean, I'm watching a couple of teams this past Sunday.

It looked like Ghana playing Nigeria, and it's gonna get blacker owing to the concussion issue because whites are dropping out.

This is a growing contradiction.

This is not gonna get better.

It's gonna become more strained, and this sophistry about, "Well, it's the national anthem," doesn't help to move the conversation forward.

-The NFL has agreed to commit $89 million over the next seven years to social justice causes considered important to the African-American community.

-Kaepernick remains unsigned, leaving some to suggest that he's being blackballed for his controversial protest.

-In October 2017, Kaepernick accused NFL team owners of colluding to keep him out of the league, a case that was later settled, but in the midst of it, sportswear giant Nike revealed he would be the face of a new advertising campaign.

-The face of controversy now part of a global campaign.

-While some on social media declared a boycott of the company, others saw it as a sign of progress since 1968 that a major corporation viewed Kaepernick's fight as not only acceptable but marketable.

-For the people who take these stands, there often entails a significant degree of personal sacrifice, but I think it's the thing that people do out of a sense of a broader humanity.

♪♪ -Today's Me Too Movement has not only put a spotlight on hostile work environments for women but it's also raised questions about why it took so long for their stories to become public.

-It turns out there are answers to be found in an earlier wave of sexual harassment in the workplace on Wall Street in the 1980s and '90s.

Women had entered the traditionally male-dominated world of finance in large numbers.

The ensuing harassment scandals had repercussions that are still affecting the workplace today.

It became easier for companies to cover up the problem and harder for victims to get their cases heard.

♪♪ -I wanted to go to Wall Street because I was basically lower-middle class at the time, and I wanted a taste of the good life.

-Marlene Jupiter started working on Wall Street in the early 1980s.

-You knew that you were going into a man's world, but I loved Wall Street.

It had that excitement of being part of the future.

-In just over a decade, she became one of the top performers at her firm, earning close to $1 million a year.

-I became a senior VP, and then I landed very huge hedge-fund accounts, and that was when, really, the lions came on.

-According to Jupiter, some of the male brokers began making anti-Semitic comments and spreading false sexual rumors about her that got worse the more that she earned.

-They would call me the chick with the [bleep] They would deliver cakes with dildos on it, and that was, like, you know, supposed to be funny.

And then, when I was on vacation, I get phone calls that they're trying to sabotage my customers.

Basically, they're telling you that you're not really welcome at the party.

You're a woman.

You're not one of us.

-Wall Street was a hotbed of sex harassment, of gender discrimination.

The environment was as bawdy and as sexualized as any in this country.

-The name of the game was to make the women feel like they didn't belong there, and that played out in a lot of ways.

Women would come back from maternity leave and lose their jobs.

Women would try to get a promotion from sales assistant to broker, and they weren't allowed to do it, but the guys could.

And then, at the other extreme, you had sexual assault and sexual harassment.

It was almost like a weapon to show them, you know, you shouldn't be here, and if you're gonna be here, we're gonna make you really, really uncomfortable.

-Being bullied destroys your confidence.

It destroys everything about you, and I would go to human resources, and it would go away for a few months, and then it would come back.

At one point, I was getting physically sick.

That's when I decided to leave.

I couldn't function anymore.

-She quit, and she wasn't planning on doing anything.

She wasn't gonna sue them, but then she had a great job lined up.

The employer called her old trading desk to ask about her, and they trashed her, and she didn't get the job, and that's when she said, "I've had enough."

-But for brokers like Jupiter, taking an employer to court wasn't an option because of a small clause in their licensing paperwork.

-In the '90s, everyone in the securities industry was required to register with the SEC.

In theory, it was to make sure that they were hiring people without crimes in their background, but one of the boxes you had to check said that you agree to arbitrate any claim you had against your employer, so you had no choice.

You could not work in the industry without waiving your right to bring a claim in a public court.

-Arbitration was designed to avoid the courthouse by swiftly resolving conflicts before a private panel.

-The securities industry had set up its own arbitration system, which was run by them, and the purpose of the system was to protect it from liability.

It was all industry insiders, many of whom were not even lawyers.

-The vast majority of the industry's arbitrators were white, male, and over 60, reinforcing what many felt were deeply rooted institutional biases.

-I thought I was gonna win.

I had witnesses that came through the arbitration, but I lost.

If I had gone to court, I am sure I would've won.

-Jupiter wasn't alone.

At the time, the majority of women who brought harassment cases to arbitration on Wall Street lost, and it happened behind closed doors.

-When you go to arbitration, there are no public documents filed.

There are no reporters or members of the public allowed in the room to watch, and it allows their rainmakers to be repeat offenders because nobody ever finds out.

-Susan Antilla was one of the first journalists to report on the pervasive sexual harassment and discrimination on Wall Street.

-It's all about silence.

It's all about keeping these cases quiet.

-But in 1996, that silence was broken.

-Tonight, the lawsuit that everyone on Wall Street is watching -- outrageous claims about men behaving badly at Smith Barney.

-Women were referred to as bitches and whores.

-A group of Wall Street women joined together in a class-action lawsuit, allowing them to circumvent arbitration and bring their cases into court.

-The potential class-action suit is extremely important because it aims at much more than collecting damages.

The 23 women are trying to bring down the arbitration system, the pillar of employee relations on Wall Street.

-It was brilliant.

They got the cases filed in court, and all of a sudden, they started hearing from other women all around the country.

The coverage of that case changed everything because the brokerage firms couldn't hide anymore.

It got broadcast coverage.

It got print coverage.

Everybody was watching, and that's the difference.

You never saw that about an arbitration case.

-They would never treat men the way they have treated us.

-He said that he wanted to pull my stockings down and sit me on his lap.

-I was up, like, against this wall.

I was trying to get free from him, and I just...

He was my friend.

-Lisa Mays was among the first women to join the class-action suit against Smith Barney.

The assault at her workplace still haunts her today.

-He lifted up my skirt and started to put his hands, like, underneath my tights to pull down my tights, and then, luckily, something happened, and the front door clicked, and he walked away from me like nothing happened, like nothing had just occurred.

-Mays reported the incident to human resources, but she says her complaint was ignored, and her attacker stayed on the job.

Then when I found out about the lawsuit and that the company was calling it an isolated incident, I was like, "It's not.

I have to get involved.

I have to call these lawyers," and they couldn't believe what had happened to me.

-Nearly 2,000 women joined the lawsuit, and other suits soon followed.

-The cloud hangs over America's financial community.

Almost every major firm faces or has faced a sexual-discrimination charge.

-It really was a Me Too Movement.

"Oh, yeah.

That happened to me, as well."

And it was contagious.

-In the wake of the publicity, firms implemented programs to address sexual-harassment and discrimination concerns.

-Under the agreement, Smith Barney will establish a $15 million fund to train and recruit more women and minorities.

-There was a moment in time after those Wall Street cases were brought when there was such optimism, and people really thought that change was gonna happen across the board -- with pay, with promotion, with everything.

-The Securities and Exchange Commission even eliminated the requirement to arbitrate over discrimination claims, but many firms inserted the requirement into employee handbooks and contracts, creating a road map that other industries followed.

-Wall Street was the model that management lawyers pointed to to convince their clients that it was time to start compelling arbitration of discrimination claims.

They literally would produce papers that said, "Look at what the securities industry has been able to do with their sex-harassment claims," and they would list sex-harassment claim -- claim dismissed; sex-harassment claim -- claim dismissed; discrimination claim -- claim dismissed.

And that was a marketing device and very effective because it's all true.

-Back when the women on Wall Street were suing, in the mid-1990s, 7% of US companies then had mandatory arbitration, and today it's more than half.

-That trend has become a flash point in the latest fight against harassment and discrimination.

-The Me Too Movement is taking down big names for sexual assault and sexual harassment.

-Hundreds of people on Sunday brought their fight against sexual violence to the heart of Hollywood.

-Rise up for the women of the world... -From secret settlements to confidentiality clauses, there's been a public reckoning on how victims' stories have been kept quiet for so long.

-Former "Fox News" anchor Gretchen Carlson is suing her former boss, Roger Ailes, claiming she was let go for refusing his sexual advances.

-I did not even realize how pervasive this epidemic of sexual harassment and forced arbitration was in our society until after I brought my case forward, and then hundreds and then thousands of women started reaching out to me, and their stories had never been told, a lot of them because of arbitration.

-Carlson herself was bound by arbitration, but her lawyers filed a court suit, anyway.

In the end, she settled her case and signed a non-disclosure agreement.

Today, she's been helping to gather support for legislation that would prohibit mandatory arbitration in cases involving sexual harassment.

-Arbitration completely perpetuates harassment in the workplace.

There are no appeals.

You don't get the same amount of witnesses.

It's secret.

You normally get a much paltry settlement than you would if you were in an open court system.

If the majority of these cases are not going into an open-jury process, then how do we make progress as a nation on building upon case after case after case?

That's how our legal system works.

-The courts are overwhelmed with litigation.

There are many courts in the country that just can't make a dent in getting through their docket.

-Attorney Alan Kaplinsky is a leading advocate for the use of arbitration in consumer and employment disputes.

He says the process has an important role to play.

-Arbitration -- it's a lot less costly than going to court.

It's a lot faster.

It's extremely efficient, and it's a process that is time-tested.

There are always gonna be anecdotes, one-off stories that people are gonna be able to tell, but I haven't seen actual data showing any connection between arbitration and the increase of wrongdoing by employers.

There's just no connection.

-Today, a new generation of workers is demanding an end to mandatory arbitration.

-Tonight, a massive walkout across the country and around the world -- Google employees revolting over the treatment of women, including the handling of workplace sexual harassment.

-The employees have a list of demands, including an end to forced arbitration and a commitment to end pay and opportunity disparity.

-We demand structural change... -The Google walkout wasn't just about sexual harassment.

It was about this large, structural imbalance of power that has caused inequity in a number of areas.

We wanted anyone who was discriminated against for race, or wrongfully terminated, to also be protected.

-And some of these demands are starting to be met.

-Google has released a new policy ending forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment and assault.

It's in response to recent protests.

-Other tech companies are taking notice, like Facebook, which said they would do the same, and on Monday, Airbnb said it was ending forced arbitration not just for sexual harassment but all cases involving discrimination.

-All of this is about fighting for equity.

It's about true equality to know that whether it's about being free from harassment, being free from stereotypes, from inadequate pay, all of that has to change in order to be able to say, "Yes, you and I are truly equal in the eyes of the law."

-Change is happening, albeit slowly.

-If you look at Wall Street today, you do see less harassment.

You certainly see less blatant stuff happening, but you still see pay disparities.

You still see women being pushed out.

-Two decades after the sexual- harassment cases of the '90s, only an estimated 17% of brokers are women.

-My big concern about Me Too is that we'll see a backslide when you don't see coverage of this as much anymore, so there's a real lesson to be learned from those early cases.

♪♪ -The remote wetlands of the Florida Everglades are home to rare and beautiful wildlife, but today, this wildlife is being devoured by an invader that has already eliminated 90% of some species.

It's a giant snake not native to the region or even the U.S., and that's gotten a lot of people's attention.

So how did pythons from Asia become such a problem in this country?

-For that, we have to blame a different animal -- humans, who, over the past few decades, have been increasingly responsible for the growing threat from invasive species.

♪♪ -This is a 12-foot-long Burmese python caught by a Port St. Lucie police sergeant in the middle of a neighborhood.

-Encounters with wayward snakes, once pets in someone's home, are a regular feature on the news in reptile-loving Florida today.

-Oh, my God.

That's on our street?

-Yes.

Yes, it was.

-More than 2 million constrictor snakes, pythons, boas, and anacondas have been imported into the U.S. Non-venomous but still fearsome, they kill their prey by strangling it, then eating it whole.

Despite all that, the Burmese python, bred in a rainbow of colors, caught on with rock stars and regular folks.

-It used to kind of be the biker, long-haired, tattooed, you know, rebellious guy.

Now it can be a lawyer, a doctor.

Really, the person next door could be keeping reptiles.

-And often, the person next door doesn't understand what they've gotten into.

-They buy them, you know, 12, 14 inches long, but then three or four years later they realize, you know, it's a 7, 8-foot snake, and they can't take care of it anymore.

-You going in tail first?

-Snakes roaming neighborhoods are one thing, but how did they end up 80 miles from Miami in a remote region of Everglades National Park?

It all began in the pre-Instagram 1980s when park visitors filled out cards to report sightings of snakes that were bigger than anything they'd seen before.

-One time, I got a call from Royal Palm Hammock, and it was about an 11-footer, a female, didn't have a mark on her, and when I opened her up, she was just full of fat -- no parasites, no nothing.

This was somebody's pet, clearly.

-A pet most likely dumped out of the trunk of someone's car.

-The problem isn't just pets.

Hurricane Andrew destroyed snake hatcheries in the Miami area sending hundreds of baby snakes into the Everglades.

-By 2000, Meshaka had published a study warning that Burmese pythons were reproducing in the southern end of the park.

-At the park, it was not met with the sense of urgency that I felt it warranted.

It is, in a way, a ticking time bomb.

Will it be relatively localized?

Will it explode?

Which, lo and behold, it did.

-In the four years after Meshaka's warning, python captures around the park went from 2 a year to 70.

-Got him?

-Yep.

-Park officials were caught behind the curve.

-We couldn't go to the Home Depot and buy a can of snake-be-gone and just figure out what the right dosage was to kill it.

We didn't have those tools.

Those tools weren't there.

-At the state level, Florida Fish and Wildlife officials hesitated to ban the sale of pythons, a move that would hurt the state's then-$100 million reptile industry, hoping the snakes might die off on their own.

-We keep saying, "Well, let's just make sure we get this right," you know?

"We don't want to ruffle any feathers.

Let's make sure we really know that this is gonna be a problem before we go and really impact somebody's livelihood."

Were we taking it seriously?

I would -- in my personal, no.

-What forced the issue onto everyone's radar were clashes between pythons and the park's top predator, the alligator.

-After a 30-hour exhaustive battle, a draw.

What you're looking at is a 13-foot python that ate an entire 6-foot alligator before bursting.

-That was sort of the very first, very public display of these two rather large reptiles, and it's kind of a turning point for both management as well as the media, I think, to pay attention.

-And pay attention they did.

-An alien species is invading the swampland of America.

-As python captures soared at 367 in one year, so did media speculation about how big and scary the problem was.

-Snakes are eating Florida.

-150,000... -183,000... -Over 200,000... -...on the loose, traveling faster than you might think.

-A clear and present danger to people.

-What would come out would be, "Big snake.

Be afraid."

-Adding to the sense of panic, a tragedy in 2009.

♪♪ ♪♪ -The autopsy report revealed the snake had, in fact, strangled 2-year-old Shaianna Hare and may have tried to eat her.

-There have been 10 Americans strangled by constrictors since 1990, all victims in homes where snakes were kept as pets.

Pythons have never attacked a tourist in the Everglades, but that didn't stop park visitors from being spooked.

-I was afraid that there would be snakes everywhere -- pythons and everything.

-The real danger, park biologists argue, was not to humans but to wildlife.

With few natural predators to keep them in check, pythons were eating their way through the ecosystem, devastating populations of native birds and mammals, including a 76-pound deer.

-We know very little about them in their native habitat, so it makes it that much harder when they become an invasive species.

-She's not happy.

-With their $10 billion effort to restore the Everglades under threat... -Oh, watch out!

-...federal and state agencies began spending $1 million a year on python control... -Find it, Bea!

Find it, find it, find it!

-...enlisting a python-sniffing dog, implanting transmitters in so-called Judas snakes to lead scientists to mating areas... -Aah!

-...and setting traps.

But the efforts barely made a dent.

The snakes set new records for length, this one over 17 feet, and for eggs -- 79 in one female.

-Ready?

One, two, three, smile!

-With Florida still allowing the sale of pythons as pets, the federal government in 2008 began considering a ban on imports of Burmese pythons and eight other giant snakes.

The reptile industry argued it would kill jobs in their $2 billion national industry.

-It will destroy American businesses, and it will damage hundreds of thousands of people economically.

-There's no Second Amendment that says I can keep a python, but if you take the Burmese python away, the next thing you know, you're taking a leopard gecko away, and then maybe your dog or cat.

You know, where does it stop?

-The action that we're taking today is a milestone for us in the protection of the Everglades.

-In the end, after years of debate, as pythons expanded their range, the government went ahead and banned imports of eight giant snakes.

One newspaper expressed skepticism, saying, "It's closing the reptile cage after the snakes have already slithered out."

But pythons are not the only escaped or released pets that have become a public menace.

-Scientists are tracking an exotic invader -- a small fish that has become one of the biggest bullies in the Atlantic Ocean.

-Venomous lionfish, imported from Asia for aquariums, are preying on native fish from Florida to Rhode Island.

-We have this non-native species living here, and it really likes utility poles.

-Exotic birds from South America are causing headaches for power companies, and Florida's latest pet gone wild?

-It's a cold-blooded killer, eating its way through the Everglades.

-A four-foot lizard with a nasty bite, the Argentine tegu.

-There is nothing similar to this lizard in Florida, so when they get to a place like this, it's kind of like walking into an untouched banquet table.

-Tegus are eating the eggs of native birds and reptiles.

Scientists are trying to contain it through trapping.

-Nothing.

-But the lizard is reproducing in two counties and spreading.

-To the west of us, where tegus are heading towards rapidly, is one of the largest nesting areas for the threatened American crocodile.

A species that we brought back from the brink of extinction now may be threatened again by an invasive species.

-In Florida, where there are now more non-native lizards than native ones, officials say stopping the tegu is a top priority.

And yet tegus are still for sale as pets, virtually guaranteeing more releases or escapes into the wild.

-I think, overall, the problem that we're having is that we as human beings do not react until we've demonstrated there's a real problem.

When you get to the point where you know you have trouble, then it's too late to fix it.

-What do you guys think your chances are of finding a python?

-Good.

Oh, real good, yeah.

-After a public hunt in the Everglades in 2013 bagged a disappointing 68 snakes, officials switched gears, hiring a posse of trained python hunters to track them down and remove them, paying minimum wage and a bounty of up to $25 a foot.

-Take a look at this monster in the swamp -- a gigantic python more than 17 feet long.

-They just get longer and longer.

-But so far, nothing has stopped the python population from swelling to an estimated 100,000, and the National Park Service now admits the big snakes are here to stay.

-We don't know what to bring to the battle, right?

We really don't yet have all that figured out.

-Battling invasive animals, including those that arrived by way of the pet trade, costs taxpayers an estimated $50 billion a year.

-We really should have a proactive approach, and we still don't.

Nobody's screening all the non-native wildlife that's being imported into United States to say which one's gonna be the next bad actor.

I mean, that right there just floors me.

-Maybe the way to put it is that the lesson learned is that no one's learned their lesson.

How's that for an awful lesson learned?

♪♪ -Are we allowing a toxic product to be advertised on TV?

-"New Yorker" humorist Andy Borowitz investigates.

-Mass destruction.

-Sexual relations.

-Potato.

-Fear.

-Aah!

-Hello.

-Oh, damn it.

-None of it makes sense.

-Maybe you guys should get a sense of humor.

-[ Laughs ] -I knew this was gonna wind up in a crazy place.

♪♪ -Election season is here, and one out of every three Americans is currently running for office.

-Hello, I'm Andrew Yang and I'm running for president.

-Cory!

-What's up?!

-I'm going to tell you something you may never have heard from someone running for president before.

-Eat my kids' brains.

-♪ Baby, we were born to run ♪ -Political ads are a way for candidates to demonstrate they can perform an elected official's most important duties, like a firm handshake, looking Americans straight in the eye, and standing up for what's right without taking their shoes off, and teleporting us into the future.

Political ads seem harmless, but they can promote an unsavory product.

-Richard Nixon -- a man of compassion, courage, and conscience.

-I know sometimes you wonder, what's the governor up to?

-I'm Jerry Springer, and I want to be your governor.

-Roy Moore -- leadership we can trust.

-I'm John Edwards, and I approve this message.

-Dear God!

Our children are watching.

Should they really be exposed to content like this?

-I'm Joni Ernst.

I grew up castrating hogs.

[ Pig squeals ] -♪ Nixon now, Nixon now ♪ -There is some comfort in knowing that a few politicians do keep the promises they make in their ads.

-Donald Trump will turn Washington upside down Day One.

-Spitzer -- just imagine what he'd do as your governor.

-I am not looking to be the most popular guy.

-Mission accomplished, but that forthrightness doesn't change the fact that these politicians were able to buy advertising time to promote an often toxic product.

Where is the oversight?

♪♪ -Hi.

I'm Lee Marvin, just brushing up on my judo and enjoying my favorite smoke, Pall Mall.

-Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should.

♪♪ -In the '50s and '60s, the airwaves were clogged with cigarette ads that made highly questionable claims.

-In a nationwide survey, doctors in all branches of medicine were asked, "What cigarette do you smoke, doctor?"

The brand names most was Camel.

-Yes, cigarettes were a health-giving, life-extending panacea, the kale of their day.

-[ Coughing ] -But they were so much more.

-♪ He's an independent guy ♪ ♪ He's an Old Gold filters man ♪ -Smoking cigarettes showed that you had a maverick spirit and the presence of mind to build a house out of wood and not burn it down with your lighter.

But even as the Marlboro Man rode across the range in a scenic cloud of nicotine and tar, his days were numbered.

-The senate today passed and sent to the president a bill banning cigarette commercials from radio and television.

-I really think they pulled a fast one there.

-With evidence mounting that cigarettes were bad for the American people, the government banned cigarette ads.

Almost 50 years later, isn't it time to ban political ads?

Here's the number of people killed by cigarettes, and here's the number who died while a politician was in office.

-Aah!

-These are countries that have put limitations on political advertising on TV, but in the United States, whoever has the most money for ads has an advantage.

So for now, I recommend putting warnings on our political ads.

-Warning -- will resign in disgrace.

Warning -- his people will seek revenge on enemies using traffic cones.

Warning -- will send easily traceable bank transfers to a prostitution ring.

Warning -- leadership we can trust, just maybe not alone with our teenage daughters.

-I'm Elizabeth Warren, and I approve this message.

[ Static crackling ] ♪♪ -History is full of surprises if you know where to look.

-"Retro Report" on PBS.

Thanks for watching.

-Next time...forensic experts now have a new tool for solving cold cases.

-Genetic genealogy.

-That kicks off this revolution into how we use DNA to solve crimes.

-And... -"Dungeons & Dragons."

-...a role-playing game that created a moral panic in the '70s... -The witchcraft, the demonism, the spells.

-...looks more like a solution to today's obsession with screen time.

Plus...humorist Andy Borowitz on Al Capone's vault and other news that wasn't.

-As it turns out, we haven't found very much.

-Next time, on "Retro Report."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -This program is available on Amazon Prime Video.

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