Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1736 - Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger
Uploaded: 2021-11-18T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1736 - Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-18. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1736 - Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-18. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1736 - Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger

the Joe Rogan experience
gentlemen thank you for being here once let's in let's I keep doing these
podcasts where I just talked to people so please introduce yourself and tell
people what you do I am Tristan Harris and came on this show about a year ago
after the Social Dilemma came out that's probably where most people know me and
used to be a design ethicist at Google studying how do you ethically influence
people's attention and thoughts and behaviors and really enjoyed the
conversation last year the reason that today I'm here with Daniel Schmachtenberg
who's really a person I've learned so much from the last few years and why I
thought it'd be a good through line is that the issues of social media which I
know we're going to talk about today are connected to a number of other issues
that are going wrong in society that are all kind of interconnected and I've
learned a tremendous amount from Daniel and I thought it would help really
clarify some of these these issues for for everyone well thank you Daniel
thanks
for coming aboard thanks for having me here what a daunting task how to ethically
influence people and what a weird thing that this industry that didn't exist 20
years ago has such a I mean think about life on earth and then 20 years ago all
of a
sudden this social media thing sort of it evolves and now you have to wonder
how
much of an effect it has on our just day-to-day lives and how to ethically
influence people yeah what does that what the fuck does that even mean well
first
of all I should say how do those thoughts even get you know how does that get
worked
out actually I should first say that there wasn't at Google a department that
said
how do we ethically influence people I actually sort of as was shown in that in
the film the social dilemma wrote this presentation worried about how
technology
was influencing people's thoughts concerns behaviors etc and I studied persuasive
technology at Stanford which is a whole discipline and field the idea that
technology can influence people and it was out of my own personal concern that
when
that presentation went viral at Google I kind of worked my way into this
position that
never existed before which was how could we create a framework for what it
means to
ethically influence other people and a lot of that has to do with asymmetries
of
power I mean when I was a kid I was a magician we talked about this before
magic is
about an asymmetric relationship the magician knows something about your mind
that you don't know about your own mind that's what makes the trick work and
actually across some of these things we're gonna talk about today are ways that
there is an asymmetric relationship between what technology knows about us and
what we
don't know about ourselves when you were studying at Stanford yeah what year
was
this this was 2002 to 2006 I was an undergrad and then 2006 I got involved with
professor BJ Fogden who again actually studied ways that persuasive technology
could be used for positive purpose like how do you help people be healthier how
do
you help people floss how do you help people work out more often things like
that it
could be used in a positive way right but I got concerned because it was all of
this
increasing arms race to use persuasive tools to harvest and capture people's
attention now known as the race to the bottom of the brainstem to go down the
brainstem into more social validation more social narcissism all of that and
that's one of the arms races we see everywhere which is like in every single
thing if one oil company doesn't drill for that oil well the other one will if
one
attention company doesn't add the beautification filter the other one will
if one company doesn't do narcissism social validation hacking and so in
likes and variable rewards the other one will and it's true across so many of
the
other issues that we're facing whether it's like if I don't build the drone for
everyone then someone else is going to build the drone for everyone if I don't
so
that's how I think did you realize it back then I mean in 2002 2006 you're
talking about a completely different world in terms of social media before
the iPhone actually yeah yeah 2007 right iPhone came out in 2007 we were
studying persuasive technology and I was I've said in the past partners with
the
co-founder of Instagram in the persuasive technology class so we were
actually studying how would you apply persuasive technology to people before
the iPhone even existed and you know for you know what bothered me is that I
think when people think about how do you ethically persuade people you just get
into a whole bunch of ethical cop-outs like well we're just giving people what
they want you know or if they don't want to this they'll they'll use something
else
there's these very simple ways that the minds of people in technology the tech
industry I think defend what they're doing and what concerned me was that the
ethical framework wasn't really there not that I had one at the time by the way
I
studied at Google for three years to try to develop like what does it mean to
ethically influence three billion people who are jacked into the system and
this
is before Cambridge Analytica before the Facebook files and Frances Haugen
talking
about that you know we now have the receipts for all these things so we talked
about all these things in the social dilemma but now there's the evidence with
Frances Haugen's whistleblowing that you know Instagram makes body image
issues worse for one in three teenage girls I know I'm going fast but that's
the
the broad strokes do you know the conspiracy theory about her tell me the
conspiracy theory amongst the tinfoil hat folk is first of all she was she
started a Twitter account like right before she went there was immediately
verified right and then instantaneously was on all these major media outlets
major network television shows and being interviewed and P and she was saying
something that a lot of people felt like was a call to authoritarian
intervention into
social media that it was government censorship was the solution and regulation
was a solution to dealing with this problem and that it seemed like she was a
sanctioned whistleblower like they she was saying all the things that they
wanted to hear and that's why they put her in the position to make a big loud
noise what
what did you think about that when it came up I always have to do this you know
when
something like that happens like hmm maybe maybe because you know the
government would do that like most certainly they would love to have control
over social media they would love to be able to censor things like the
Hunter Biden laptop story they would love to be able to you know hide Joe Biden's
medical records or you know Kamala Harris's time as a prosecuting attorney like
there's a lot of
stuff they would like to do yeah or district attorney rather there's a lot of
stuff they would like to do with access to
information I mean you're seeing it right now in terms of one of the things
that's been
fascinating about kovat is during this pandemic and during this terrible time
of you know paranoia and dealing with this disease and fear and anxiety you're
seeing
this narrative from social media networks that absolutely walk step in step
with the government where if the government wants certain information censored
it's being censored across major social media platforms that has to be
coordinated there's no way it's not and there's no way they're incentivized to
not have people discuss certain things because we've said before you know it's
one of the major
points of the social dilemma is that things that are controversial whether they're
true or not are the things that are the most clicked on the most shared the
most and that's where viral yeah that's where the money is yeah so there's got
to be some sort of incentive for them to not do what they do with every other
subject whether it's immigration or gun control or abortion or anything the
algorithm
they don't censor on immigration or you're saying that as an example of
something goes viral yeah not the censorship right they don't censor on
immigration no I mean that the I mean the border crisis is a great example of
that right like the government would probably like us to not see all those Haitian
immigrants storming across the border but my god those were shared like crazy
totally you know so why
was covid information shared well because there was a narrative they could say
this is dangerous misinformation and we could protect people even though some
of it turned out to actually be accurate right like the lab leak hypothesis
you know at least at least that it's a hypothesis it's a hypothesis yeah that
at least is being considered by virologists right but the point is that
who the fuck are they to decide what can and can't be discussed and when they're
doing something step-in-step with the government I get concerned so when
someone comes along and this person who's a whistleblower says something needs
to be done you know we're endangering young girls lives we're doing this we're
doing that we need some sort of government intervention I mean this is
essentially calling for censorship and calling for government control of social
media which freaks people out
so she's pretty clear that she's not calling for censorship but it's the reason
I asked you it was curious what how it came across your radar because I happen
to know and hear a little bit about this from her we interviewed her on our on
our podcast and the story that goes viral about her saying that she's a psyop
yeah that she's a plant that's an incendiary inflammatory controversial story
so when that gets suggested is it going to go is it just going to fizzle out or
is it going to go viral it's ironic it's going to go viral exactly and in fact
the when you kind of realize like everything I mean there's there's some things
that are real conspiracy
theories and there's some things that are real psyops and there's there's that's
a real thing but notice how many things we think of as psyops conspiracies etc
now and it's because anything that has that incendiary quality goes goes goes
viral and I happen to know for example I think one of the things the claims in
there is that she's funded by this billionaire Piero Midiar but I happen to
know from talking to her that that happened at the very very end of what she
was doing and it was a tiny grant of like $150,000 for us in the nonprofit
world that's like a tiny amount of money basically
basically just to support her flight costs and I happen to also sort of hear
from her how like at the how much of the media was constructed the very last
minute like she was working this one newspaper the Wall Street Journal to do
this sort of procedural rollout of specific stuff that she thought was
concerning I guess what I'll just say is like what if she's just a good faith
person right saw that virality was driving people crazy and that it was it was
harmful to teenage girls and it's true that the the government would
see some of that and say hey we could use that for something else we could use
that she could be a tool for us to do something else but I guess what you know
and in the aim of complexity and nuance and not jumping to conclusions and this
sort of thing
thing my perception from from talking to her now extensively she's a very good
faith actor who was concerned that this was going to drive the world apart I
should be really clear this is not my position yeah she's this is just the
conspiracy theory I literally don't have an opinion on her yeah I do have an
opinion on
algorithms and I do have an opinion on what it does do to young girls self-esteem
and I do you have teenage daughters yes I just think it mean in young girls are
a point of focus because for why they're point of focus more than young boys I'm
not entirely sure I guess it has to do with her emotional makeup and and there's
higher ris