Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris
Uploaded: 2020-10-30T17:00:13.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-30. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-10-30. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris

Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day.
Tristan, how are you?
Good.
Good to be here.
Good to have you here, man.
You were just telling me before we went on air the numbers of the Social Dilemma,
and
they're bonkers.
So just say that.
Yeah, the Social Dilemma was seen by 38 million households in the first 28 days
on Netflix,
which I think is broken records.
And if you assume, you know, a lot of people are seeing it with their family
because parents
seeing it with their kids, the issues that are on teen mental health.
So if you assume one out of 10 families saw it with a few family members, we're
in the
40 to 50 million people range, which is just broken records, I think, for
Netflix.
I think it was the second most popular documentary throughout the month of
September, or film
throughout the month of September.
It was a really well-done documentary, but I think it's one of those
documentaries that
affirmed a lot of people's worst suspicions about the dangers of social media.
And then on top of that, it sort of alerted them to what they were already
experiencing
in their own personal life and, like, highlighted it.
Yeah, I think that's right.
I mean, most people were aware, I think it's a thing everyone's been feeling,
that the feeling
you have when you use social media isn't that this thing is just a tool or it's
on my side.
It is an environment based on manipulation, as we say in the film.
And that's really what's changed, that, you know, I remember, you know, I've
been working
on these issues for something like eight or eight years or something now.
You please tell people who didn't see the documentary what your background is
and how
you got into it.
Yeah, so I, you know, the film goes back as a set of technology insiders.
My background was as a design ethicist at Google.
So I first had a startup company that we sold to Google.
I landed there through a talent acquisition.
And then started, about a year into being at Google, made a presentation that
was about
how, essentially, technology was holding the human collective psyche in its
hands, that
we were really controlling the world's psychology.
Because every single time people look at their phone, they are basically
experiencing thoughts
and scrolling through feeds and believing things about the world.
This has become the primary meaning-making machine for the world.
And that we, as Google, had a moral responsibility to, you know, hold the
collective psyche in
a thoughtful, ethical way and not create this sort of race to the bottom of the
brainstem
attention economy that we now have.
So my background was as a kid.
I was a magician.
We can get into that.
I studied at a lab at Stanford called, or studied in a class called the
Stanford Persuasive Technology
class, that taught a lot of the engineers in Silicon Valley, kind of how the
mind works.
And the co-founders of Instagram were there.
And then later studied behavioral economics and how the mind is sort of
influenced.
I went into cults and started studying how cults work.
And then arrived at Google through this lens of, you know, technology isn't
really just this
thing that's in our hands.
It's more like this manipulative environment that is tapping into our
weaknesses.
Everything from the slot machine rewards to, you know, the way you get tagged
in a photo
and it sort of manipulates your social validation and approval, these kinds of
things.
When you were at Google, did they still have the don't be evil sign up?
I don't know if there's actually a physical sign.
There was never a physical sign?
I thought there was something that they actually had.
I think it was, there was this guy, was it Paul, not Paul, what was his last
name?
He was the inventor, one of the inventors of Gmail.
And they had a meeting and they came up with this mantra because they realized
the power
that they had and they realized that there was going to be a conflict of
interest between
advertising on the search results and regular search results.
And so we know that, they knew that they could have used that power and they
came up with
this mantra, I think in that meeting in the early days to don't be, don't be
evil.
There was a time where they took that mantra down and I remember reading about
it online
and, and they took it off their page, I think.
That's what it was.
Yeah.
And, uh, when I read that, I was like, that should be big news.
Like, there's no reason to take that down.
Why would you take that down?
Yeah.
Why would you, why would you say, well, let me give you a little evil.
Let's not get crazy.
It's a good question.
I mean, I wonder what logic would have you remove a statement like that.
That seems like a standard state.
Like it's a great statement.
Okay, here it is.
Google removes don't be evil clause from its code of conduct.
In 2018?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I wonder why.
Did they have an explanation?
Did it say anything?
I don't know anything.
Don't be evil has been a part of the company's corporate code of conduct since
2000 when Google
was reorganized under a new patent, uh, parent company, Alphabet in 2015.
Alphabet assumed a slightly adjusted version of the model.
Do the right thing.
Yeah.
Do the right thing.
Oh, that's a Spike Lee movie, bitch.
However, Google retained its original don't be evil language until the past
several weeks.
The phrase has been deeply incorporated into Google's company culture, so much
so that a
version of the phrase has served as the Wi-Fi password on the shuttles that
Google uses to
ferry its employees to its Mountain View headquarters.
I think I remember that.
Yeah.
Wow.
You get on the bus and you type in don't be evil.
I wonder why they decided.
Well, I mean, they, they did change it to do the right thing.
I mean, we always used to say that, um, just to friends, not within Google, but
just, you
know, instead of saying, don't be evil, just say, let's, let's do some good
here, right?
That's nice.
Let's do some good here's.
Yeah.
Think positive, think doing good instead of don't do bad.
Yeah.
But the problem is when you say do good, the question is who's good because you
live in
a morally plural society.
And there's this question of who are you to say what's good for people?
And it's much easier to say, let's reduce harms than it is to say, let's
actually do
good like this.
It says the updated version of Google's code of conduct still retains one
reference to
the company's unofficial motto.
The final line of the document is still, and remember, dot, dot, dot, don't be
evil.
And if you see something that you think isn't right, speak up.
Hmm.
Okay.
Well, they still have don't be evil though.
So maybe it's much ado about nothing.
But, uh, having that kind of power, we were just before the podcast, we were
watching Jack
Dorsey speak to members of the Senate, uh, in regards to Twitter censoring the
Hunter
Biden story and censorship of conservatives, but allowing dictators to spread
propaganda,
dictators from other countries and why, and what, what this is all about.
One of the things that, uh, Jack Dorsey has been pretty adamant about is that
they really
never saw this coming when they started Twitter and they didn't think that they
were ever going
to be in this position where they were going to be really the arbiters of free
speech for
the world.
Right.
Which is essentially in some ways what they are.
I think it's important to, to roll back the clock for people because it's easy
to think,
you know, that we just sort of landed here and that they would know that they're
going to
be influencing the global psychology.
But I think we should really reverse engineer for the audience, how did these
products work
the way that they did?
So like, let's go back to the beginning days of Twitter.
I think his first tweet was something like checking out the Buffaloes in Golden
Gate Park
in San Francisco.
Um, you know, Jack was fascinated by the taxi cab dispatch system that you
could send a
message and then all the taxis get it.
And the idea is, could we create a dispatch system so that I post a tweet and
then suddenly
all these other people can see it and, um, the, the real genius of these things
was that
they weren't just, uh, offering this thing you could do.
They found ways of keeping people engaged.
Um, I think this is important for people to get that they're not competing for
your data
or for, uh, you know, money.
They're competing to keep people using the product.
And so when Twitter, for example, invented this persuasive feature of the
number of followers
that you have, if you remember, like that was a new thing at the time, right?
You log in and you see your profile, here's the people who you can follow, and
then here's
the number of followers you have that created a reason for you to come back
every day to
see how many followers do I have?
So that was part of this race to keep people engaged.
As we talk about in the film, like these things are competing for your
attention, that
if you're not paying for the product, you are the product, but the thing that
is the
product is your predictable behavior.
You're using the product in predictable ways.
And, um, I remember a conversation I had with, um, someone at Facebook, uh, who
was a friend
of mine who said in a, in a coffee shop, uh, one day, people think that we
Facebook are
competing with something like Twitter, that one social network is competing
with another
social network.
But really, he said, our biggest competitor is YouTube because they're not
competing for,
uh, social networks.
They're competing for attention.
And YouTube is the biggest competitor in the digital space for attention.
And that was a real light bulb moment for me because you, you realize that as
they're
designing these products, they're finding new clever ways to get your attention.
That's the, the real thing that I think is different in the film, the social
dilemma,
rather than talking about, you know, censorship and data and privacy and these
themes.
It's really, what is the core influence or impact that the shape of these
products have on how
we're making meaning of the world when they're steering our psychology?
Do you think that it was inevitable that someone manipulates the way people use
these things
to gather more attention?
And do you think that any of this could have been avoided if there was laws
against that?
If instead of having these algorithms that specifically target things that you're
interested
in or things that you click on or things that are going to make you engage more,
if they
just allow these things to, if someone said, listen, you can have these things,
you can allow
people to communicate with each other, but you can't manipulate their attention
span.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the, so we've always had an attention economy, right?
And you're competing for it right now.
Um, and politicians compete for it.
Can you vote for someone you've never paid attention to, never heard about,
never heard
them say something, you know, outrageous?
No.
Um, so there's always been an attention economy.
And so it's hard to say we should regulate who gets attention or how.
But it's, it's organic in some ways.
Right.
Like this podcast is an organic, I mean, if we're in competition, it's organic.
I just put it out there.
And if you watch it, you don't, or you don't, I don't, you know, I don't have
any say over
it and I'm not manipulating it in any way.
Sort of.
So, I mean, let's imagine that the podcast apps were different and they
actually, while
you're watching, they had like the hearts and the stars and the kind of voting
up in numbers.
And you could like send messages back and forth and Apple Podcasts worked in a
way that
didn't just reward, you know, the things that you clicked follow on.
It actually sort of promoted the stuff that someone said the most outrageous
thing.
Then you, as a podcast creator, have an incentive to say the most outrageous
thing.
And then you arrive at the top of 