Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1564 - Adam Alter
Uploaded: 2020-11-13T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1564 - Adam Alter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1564 - Adam Alter' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-13. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1564 - Adam Alter

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Adam.
Hey, Joe.
How are you? What's going on?
Yeah, not too bad, thanks. Not much happening. Just the pandemic.
I really enjoyed your book, man. It's terrifying and accurate and irresistible.
Thank you. I appreciate that.
When you write a book like that, I mean, first of all, the irony is not lost on
me that we're doing an electronic show about avoiding electronics.
Like, it's so much of a part of our life, our addiction to all these devices
and games and applications and all these different things.
But yet we use them constantly. It's such a weird balancing act, isn't it?
Yeah, it is a weird balancing act. I think a lot of people who write about this
stuff and think about it really just focus on all the negatives.
There are obviously massive positives, right?
This is a time when we're being forced to physically distance ourselves from
other people.
And yet we are incredibly lucky to be able to carry on conversations like this,
to be able to connect to other people through screens.
And so screens are in many ways great, but obviously there are downsides as
well.
Yeah, the good thing is that people can work remotely.
And I think there's a lot of people that are recognizing that.
It's not really necessary to be in a cooped up office all the time.
And many people are finding that they're even more productive from home.
But then you've got distractions while you're at home that you, you know, you
could just look at whatever you want on your computer if no one's looking over
your shoulder.
And therein lies the problem with being connected to the Internet, really,
right?
Yeah, I think that's a really big part of it.
It's that the good stuff, the stuff that brings us value, that makes it
possible to connect to people.
You know, there are huge values that come from being on the screen.
There's a lot of great stuff there.
But it's so close in proximity to all the stuff that takes us away from what we
should be doing.
And so you're constantly trying to balance these two issues.
Yeah, I know several comics who write on a computer that doesn't have Wi-Fi.
They've disabled the Wi-Fi on their computer just so specifically they can
never get on the Internet while they're writing.
Because it is, it's such a pull.
Like, there's such a, it's so difficult to imagine that people lived without it.
And that now that we have it, it's so difficult to ignore.
It's so difficult to get away.
Yeah, it's true.
There's this big push in the last few decades, especially in the last decade,
called Retro-mania,
which is this kind of falling in love with things that are past, that are from
the past,
things that people didn't really like at the time that much.
And so now we've got all these capacities and capabilities on screens that make
them phenomenal.
And they can do so many more things than they used to be able to do.
But like a writer who's trying to get work done, the only way to really do it
sometimes is to roll back time 10 or 20 years.
And so there are a lot of people who do that.
They'll disable the most kind of advanced features on the screens they're using
because it's the only way to get past that hurdle of trying to do the right
thing but have the wrong thing be right there at your fingertips.
When you're writing a book like yours, which is warning people about technology,
what was your motivation for doing this?
Is this something that you've struggled with personally?
Is this something that you've just seen other people struggle with?
Like what was the reason?
Yeah, it's definitely something I've struggled with a lot.
And I think a lot of us in academia who end up writing about topics like this
focus on the things that are most prominent for us.
I remember being on a flight once between New York and LA, so a good six-hour
flight.
And a friend had texted me and said, you should check out a game.
It was this game that he told me to check out, a game called Flappy Bird.
And I downloaded this game on the runway.
And I remember as we took off, I started playing.
And I had grand designs of doing work, having a good nap, having some food.
And I spent six hours playing this game so that by the time we landed, I had
done absolutely none of the stuff I was planning to do.
And I remember landing and the guy next to me actually turned to me and said,
are you okay?
Because I kind of sat there just tapping the screen like a maniac for six hours.
And I remember thinking, this is not good if I, you know, I'm a reasonably high-functioning
individual and six hours just melted away.
Now, you blow that up to a lifetime.
We're spending like 15 or 20 years behind these screens.
And so the question is, are we doing it in a way that's good for us or is it
not good for us?
And so that's what inspired me to research this and to write about it, to try
to get a sense of, you know, what I think of as the biggest, the single biggest
change in the way we live as a planet in the last 20 years.
And trying to get a sense of whether that's being mostly good, mostly bad,
somewhere in the middle of at least, you know, pushing people to think more
about this thing that's occupying so much of their time.
Because that's what I wanted to do.
I wanted to understand better.
You know, it's fine if you're going to spend one flight doing the wrong thing
for six hours if you have other plans.
But expand that to the lifespan, talking about 80 years or so, I think it's
going to have a huge effect on the way we live.
And so I wanted to understand it more deeply.
There was a – which was the game that you wrote about where the maker of the
game, even though it was hugely successful, decided to delete it?
Yeah, that's the one that I started playing.
That was Flappy Bird?
Yeah.
Flappy – yeah, Flappy Bird.
It's – he removed it from the market.
It was an incredible thing.
This guy was making an absolute killing.
You know, at its peak, he was making – I think it was something like tens or
even hundreds of thousands of dollars a day in ad revenue,
which, you know, for an indie game developer, you create this game, it's kind
of a move of passion more than anything.
You just enjoy pouring your artistic talents into making this game.
You don't expect to make tons of money.
But the guy was making and killing.
And, you know, rare in this industry, and I think rare in any commercial
industry, he had a conscience,
and he basically said, I feel terrible about this, and removed it from the
market.
And people reached out.
It was almost like he'd taken a drug away from drug users because he removed it
from the market.
And a lot of them responded and said, can you just, like, give me a copy on the
side?
And he was pretty firm about it.
He said no.
Wow.
Wow.
So what is so uniquely addictive about that one game?
I know there's games like Candy Crush that are uniquely addictive, and Subway
Surfers, my wife's addicted to that game.
Like, what is it about Flappy Bird that's uniquely addictive?
I'll tell you the thing for me that was addictive.
It was incredibly simple to play.
Everything about it was incredibly straightforward.
There was a clear objective, and you could see the little points tick upwards.
So what you have to do for anyone who hasn't played the game, it's so simple.
It's just a bird who has to fly through obstacles.
It's just mindless.
But one of the things that I think made it so hard for me to stop playing was
that, you know, if you think about games in the 80s, the 90s, you'd end a game,
and you'd get this little game over screen.
And then you'd have to push a button to keep playing.
And so each time that happened, there was a little prompt that maybe you want
to get on with your life, go do something else.
The thing about Flappy Bird is the bird, when he crashes, he just automatically
reanimates, and he starts flying again.
And it almost feels rude to the bird at that point to say, I'm not going to
keep playing.
So I felt like, you know, look, we're two hours into the flight, three hours
into the flight, but that bird just never stops flying.
And I don't want to be the guy who just says, it's game over, bird.
And that's how, you know, I mean, it's an exaggeration.
It's a bit silly, but it's really how it felt in the moment.
And I think this is something that a lot of the screen experiences we have as a
feature now, that the companies that have produced the products that we're
using have systematically gone through their products to remove those little
cues
that would have said to us, it's time to move on.
So the maker of video games now doesn't have a big game over screen.
The game just kind of keeps rolling on.
And if you do that, you short circuit one of the things that pushes people away
from what they're doing onto the next thing.
And we call these stopping cues.
And if you think about the bottomlessness of social media feeds, they were not
bottomless when they were first designed and released.
So when Facebook first came out, you had to click a little button at the bottom
of the page that said load more.
And that's not true anymore.
Things just spool and spool and spool.
And so there's no bottom to them.
And as a result of that, we've short circuited that little nudge that used to
say, okay, move on.
And that was true of Flappy Bird.
And that's what made it so hard for me to resist it at the time.
The stopping cues or starting cues, that's one of the features that people find
uniquely addictive about TikTok.
Because TikTok videos play immediately.
I've never used TikTok.
But when I was talking to Tristan Harris, he was saying that that's one of the
things about it that really hooks people right away.
You open up the app and it just starts playing.
You don't have to click on anything.
You don't have to touch it.
It just immediately starts playing videos for you.
Yeah, it's true on most of the video playing platforms now.
TikTok's certainly true.
It's true about Netflix.
They're all just designed to autoplay.
And so that's removing one of the decision points that might have stopped
people from engaging.
And as a result, we're just kind of automatically right in there.
You know, you basically want to take people from not being in an experience to
being deeply immersed in it as quickly as possible.
And the more quickly you can do that, the more likely they are to just find
themselves kind of entranced by that process.
So a lot like playing a slot machine.
If you gamble and you sit in front of that machine, I mean, it takes only a
couple of minutes for the well-designed ones to hook you.
And suddenly you're in a trance and you're losing, generally losing a lot of
money.
And suddenly an hour's gone by or two hours.
There are no clocks.
They don't tell you that it's time to move on.
There's no sense of daylight.
You know, it could be the third sunrise.
You wouldn't have any idea that's happening.
And that's all by design.
Jamie just pulled up a statistic about Flappy Bird and the phones that still
have it now are on sale on eBay.
Flappy Bird-equipped iPhones are listed for $1,000 to $10,000 on eBay with a
few priced above $50,000.
An iPhone 5S with the app sold for $10,100.
An iPad Air listed at over $80,000 has received multiple bids.
eBay nixed the auction of a Flappy Bird-equipped iPhone as it neared $100,000,
the LA Times reports.
$100,000.
$100,000 for a regular phone or a regular iPad that has this stupid game on it.
That's how addicted people are.
Yeah, you should read it.
Check out some of the reviews of it.
It's really, it's pretty entertaining, actually, because these people, they
have such a love-hate relationship with it.
These are reviews written around the time it was released in 2014.
And you'll see these reviews that give it a five-star rating.
And then they say next to it, this game will be the death of me.
They have this perfect kind of addictive relationship with it.
And they talk about, you know, this one guy w