Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris

Joe Rogan 0:02 (dramatic music plays) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (rock music plays) Tristan, how are you?

Tristan Harris 0:13 Good. Good to be here.

Joe Rogan 0:15 Good to have you here, man. Um, you were just telling me before we went on air the numbers of The Social Dilemma.

Tristan Harris 0:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 0:21 And they're bonkers. So what, say that real quick.

Tristan Harris 0:24 Yeah. Uh, The Social Dilemma was seen by, uh, 38 million households in the first 28 days on Netflix, which I think has 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, uh, the issues that are around teen mental health. Uh, so y- if you assume one out of ten families saw it with a few family members, we're in the 40 to 50 million people range, which has just broken records, I think, for Netflix. I think it was the second most popular documentary throughout the month of September.

Joe Rogan 0:52 I think-

Tristan Harris 0:52 Or, or course, or filmed throughout the month of September.

Joe Rogan 0:54 ... 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 a-alerted them to what they were already experiencing in their own personal life and, like, highlighted it.

Tristan Harris 1:14 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, w- (sighs) I, I remember, you know, I was gonna be working on these issues for something like eight or, eight years or something now.

Joe Rogan 1:38 Could you please tell people who didn't see the documentary-

Tristan Harris 1:40 What it is, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:40 ... what, what your background is-

Tristan Harris 1:41 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:41 ... and what you, how you got into it?

Tristan Harris 1:43 Yeah, so I, uh, the, you know, the, the film goes back as a, a set of technology insiders. My, my background was as a design ethicist at Google. So I first had a startup company, uh, that we sold to Google, and I landed there through a talent acquisition. And then, um, uh, started, uh, work, about a year into being at Google, uh, 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. Uh, 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, uh, you know, hold the collective psyche in a thoughtful, ethical way and not create this sort of race to the bottom of the brain stem attention economy that we now have. Uh, so my background was as a, as a kid I was a magician. We can get into that. Uh, I, uh, studied at a lab at Stanford, uh, called, or studied in a class called the Stanford Persuasive Technology, uh, Class that taught a lot of the engineers at, in Silicon Valley kind of how the mind works, and the co-founders of Instagram were there. And, uh, 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.

Joe Rogan 3:24 When you were at Google, did they still have the "Don't be evil" sign up?

Tristan Harris 3:29 Uh, I don't know if there was actually a physical sign. Was there one?

Joe Rogan 3:31 There was never a physical sign? I thought there was something that they actually had.

Tristan Harris 3:35 I think it was, there was this guy, was it Paul T- 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, 'cause they realized the power that they had and they realized that there was gonna 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 abuse 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."

Joe Rogan 3:59 There was a time where they took that mantra down, and I remember reading about it online and, and I-

Tristan Harris 4:05 They took it off their page, I think.

Joe Rogan 4:06 That's what it was.

Tristan Harris 4:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:07 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? (laughs)

Tristan Harris 4:16 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:17 Why, why would you, why would you say, "Well, maybe it can be a little evil. Let's not get crazy."

Tristan Harris 4:21 I- it's a good question. I mean, I wonder what logic would have you remove a statement like that. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:26 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."

Tristan Harris 4:33 In 2018?

Joe Rogan 4:34 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 4:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:35 I wonder why. Did they have an explanation? Did it say anything? Uh... Underneath there? "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 motto-"

Tristan Harris 4:53 Do the right thing, yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:54 "Do the right thing." Oh, that's a Spike Lee movie, bitch.

Tristan Harris 4:56 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 4:57 "However, (laughs) Google retained its original 'Don't be evil' language until the past several weeks. The, the phrase has been deeply incorporated into Google's company culture, so much so that a version of the phrase has served as the wifi password on the shuttles that Google uses to ferry its employees to its Mountain View headquarters."

Tristan Harris 5:18 I think I remember that, yeah.

Joe Rogan 5:20 Wow.

Tristan Harris 5:20 You get on the bus and you type in, "Don't be evil."

Joe Rogan 5:22 I wonder why they decided...

Tristan Harris 5:25 Well, I mean, they, they did change it to "Do the right thing." I mean-

Joe Rogan 5:27 Mm.

Tristan Harris 5:27 ... we always used to say that, um, just to friends, not within Google, but just, you know, instead of saying, "Don't be evil," to say, "Let's, let's do some good here," right?

Joe Rogan 5:34 That's nice. Let's do some good heres. Yeah, think positive. Think doing good instead of d- don't do bad.

Tristan Harris 5:42 Yeah. But the problem is when you say, "Do good," the question is, who's good? 'Cause 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."

Joe Rogan 5:54 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... don't be evil.'"And if you see something that you think isn't right, speak up.

Tristan Harris 6:11 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:11 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 pow- ... We, 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's been pretty adamant about is that they really never saw this coming when they started Twitter.

Tristan Harris 6:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:48 And they didn't think that they were ever gonna be in this position where they were gonna be r- really the arbiters of free speech for the world.

Tristan Harris 6:56 Right.

Joe Rogan 6:56 Which is essentially in some ways what they are.

Tristan Harris 6:59 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 gonna 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?

Joe Rogan 8:04 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 8:04 You'd log in and you'd 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, your 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."

Joe Rogan 8:57 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 8:57 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 just steering our psychology?

Joe Rogan 9:23 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've 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 gonna make you engage more ... if they just allowed these things to ex- ... They ... 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"?

Tristan Harris 9:58 Yeah. I mean, I think the ... So we've always had an attention economy, right?

Joe Rogan 10:01 Right. Sure.

Tristan Harris 10:01 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 or-

Joe Rogan 10:17 But it's ... There ... It's organic in some ways.

Tristan Harris 10:20 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:20 Like, this podcast is an organic ... I mean, if we're in competition, it's organic.

Tristan Harris 10:25 Right.

Joe Rogan 10:25 I just put it out there, and if you watch it, you don't ... Or, or you don't ... I don't, you know, I don't have any say over it, and I'm, I'm not manipulating it in any way.

Tristan Harris 10:33 Sort of. So, I mean, let's imagine that the podcast apps were different-

Joe Rogan 10:37 Okay.

Tristan Harris 10:37 ... 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 th- that someone said the most outrageous thing.

Joe Rogan 10:55 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 10:55 Then you, as a podcast creator, have an incentive to say the most outrageous thing, and then you arrive at the top of the Apple Podcasts or Spo- or Spotify app.

Joe Rogan 11:02 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 11:03 And, and that's the thing, is that we actually are competing for attention. It felt like it was neutral, and it was relatively neutral. And to progress that story back in time with, um, you know, Twitter competing for attention, let's look at some other things that they did. So, they also added this retweet, this instant re-sharing feature, right? And that made it more addictive, 'cause suddenly we're all playing the fame lottery, right? Like I could retweet your stuff and then you get a bunch of hits, and then you could go viral, then you could get a lot of attention. So then instead of, um, the companies competing for attention, now each of us suddenly win the fame lottery over and over and over again, and we're, we're getting attention. Uh, and then, um ... Oh, I had another example I was gonna think about, and I forgot it. What was it? Um, you can jump in if you want.

Joe Rogan 11:44 Um, Apple has an interesting way of handling sort of, uh ... The, the way they have their algorithm for their podcast app is, it's secret. It's kinda, it's weird.

Tristan Harris 11:57 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 11:57 But one of the things that it favors is it favors new shows and it favors, uh, engagement and new subscribers, so comments, engagement-... and new shows. So, like, you-

Tristan Harris 12:10 There you go. And that's the same as competing for attention, 'cause engagement must mean people like it. And that's-

Joe Rogan 12:14 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 12:14 And there's gonna be a fallacy as we go down that road, but go on.

Joe Rogan 12:17 Well, it's interesting because you could... Let's say if you have a podcast and your podcast gets, like, let's say 100,000 downloads, a new podcast can come along and it can get 10,000 downloads and it'll be ahead of you in the rankings. And so you could be number three and it could be number two, and you're like, "Well, how was that number two and it's got 10 times less?" But they don't do it that way.

Tristan Harris 12:40 Right.

Joe Rogan 12:40 And their logic is they don't want the podcast world to be dominated by, you know, New York Times and-

Tristan Harris 12:46 The big ones, yeah.

Joe Rogan 12:46 Yeah. And whatever, whatever's number one and number two and number three forever.

Tristan Harris 12:50 We actually just experienced this. Um, uh, we have a podcast called Your Undivided Attention, and since the film came out, in that first month, we went from being, you know, in the lower 100 or something like that, to we shot to the top five. I think we were the number one tech podcast for a while. And so we just experienced this, through the fact, not that we had the most listeners-

Joe Rogan 13:07 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 13:07 ... but because the trend was so rapid that we sort of jumped, uh, to the top.

Joe Rogan 13:11 I think it's wise that they do that, because eventually it, it evens out over time. You know, you see some people rocket to the top and like, "Oh my God, we're number three."

Tristan Harris 13:21 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:21 And you're like, "Hang on there, fella. Just give it a couple of weeks." And then three weeks later, four weeks later, now they're number 48.

Tristan Harris 13:27 Right.

Joe Rogan 13:27 And they, they get depressed.

Tristan Harris 13:28 Right.

Joe Rogan 13:29 Well, that was really where you should've been. But the, the thing that Apple does that I really like in that is it gives an opportunity for these new shows to be seen. It w- where they might've gotten just stuck... 'Cause these, these rankings and the ratings for a lot of these shows, these shows are so consistent and they have such a following already-

Tristan Harris 13:49 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 13:49 ... it's very difficult for these new shows to gather attention.

Tristan Harris 13:52 Right.

Joe Rogan 13:52 And the problem was that there were some people that gamed the system and there was companies that could literally move... Like Earl Skakel. Remember Earl became the number one podcast-

Tristan Harris 14:05 Oh, yeah.

Joe Rogan 14:05 ... and, like, no one was listening to it? Earl has money and he, he hired some people to game the system, and he was kind of, like, open about it and, and laughing about it. Now, isn't he banned from iTunes now or something?

Tristan Harris 14:20 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 14:20 I think he got banned because of that, because it was so obvious he gamed the system. He had like a thousand downloads and he was number one.

Tristan Harris 14:26 I mean, it... The, the thing is that we're... Apple Podcasts you can think of as like the Federal Reserve or the government of the attention economy-

Joe Rogan 14:33 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 14:33 ... because they're setting the rules by which you win, right? They could've set the rules, as you said, to be, uh, you know, who has the most listeners and then you just keep rewarding the kings that already exist, versus who is the most trending. There's actually a story, um, a friend of mine told me. I don't, I don't know if it's true, although it was a fairly credible source who said that he was in a meeting with Steve Jobs when they were making the first podcast app, and that they had, uh, made a demo of something where you could see all the things your friends were listening to. So just like making a news feed like we do with Facebook and Twitter, right? Um, and then he said was, "Well, why would we do that? If something is important enough, your friend will actually just send you a link and say, 'You should listen to this.'"

Joe Rogan 15:15 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 15:16 Like, why would we automatically just promote random things that your friends are listening to? And again, this is kind of how you get back to social media. How is social media so successful? Because it's so... It's much more addictive-

Joe Rogan 15:27 Right.

Tristan Harris 15:27 ... to see what your friends are doing in a feed, but it doesn't reward what's true or what's meaningful. And this, uh, and this is the thing that people need to get about social media is it's, it's really just rewarding the things that tend to keep people back addictively. The business model is addiction in this race to the bottom of the brain stem for attention.

Joe Rogan 15:42 Well, it seems like if we, in hindsight, if hindsight is 20/20, what, what should have been done, or what could have been done had we known where this would pile out, is that they, they could have said, "You can't do that. You can't manipulate these algorithms to make sure that people pay more attention and manipulate them to ensure that people become deeply addicted- "

Tristan Harris 16:06 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 16:06 "... to these platforms." What you can do is just let them openly communicate-

Tristan Harris 16:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 16:11 ... but it has to be organic.

Tristan Harris 16:13 And then the problem is... So if you... This is the thing I was gonna say about Twitter is, um, when one company does the, call it the engagement feed, meaning showing you the things that the most people are clicking on and-

Joe Rogan 16:25 Trending, yeah.

Tristan Harris 16:25 ... retweeting, trending, things like that. Ver-... Let's imagine there's two feeds. So there's the feed that's called the reverse chronological feed, meaning showing in order in time, you know, "Joe Rogan posted this two hours ago," but that's, you know, after that you have the thing that people posted an hour and a half ago all the way up to 10 seconds ago. That's the reverse chronological. Um, they have a mode like that on Twitter. If you click the sparkle icon, I don't know if you know this, it'll show you just in time, here's what people said, you know, sorted by recency.

Joe Rogan 16:51 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 16:52 But then they have this other feed called what people click on, retweet, et cetera the most, the people you follow. And it sorts it by what it thinks you'll click on and want the most. Which one of those is more successful at getting your attention, the sort of recency, what they posted recently, versus what they know people are clicking on retweeting on the most?

Joe Rogan 17:10 Certainly what they know people are clicking on and retweeting the most.

Tristan Harris 17:13 Correct. And so once Twitter does that, let's say Facebook was sitting there with the recency feed, like, just showing you here's the people who posted in this time order sequence.

Joe Rogan 17:22 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 17:22 They have to also switch to who is... Like, the most relevant stuff, right? The most, uh, clicked, retweeted the most. So this is part of this race for attention that once one actor does something like that and they algorithmically, you know, figure out what peop- what's most popular, the other companies have to follow, because otherwise they won't get the attention. So it's the same thing if, you know, Netflix adds the autoplay five, four, three, two, one countdown to get people to watch the next episode. That, if that works at, say, increasing Netflix's watch time by 5%, YouTube sits there, says, "We just shrunk (laughs) how much time people were watching YouTube 'cause now they're watching more Netflix, so we're gonna add five, four, three, two, one autoplay countdown." And it becomes, again, this game theoretic race of who's gonna do more. Now if you open up TikTok...TikTok doesn't even wait... I don't know if you know or if your kids use TikTok, but when you open up the app, it doesn't even, um, wait for you to click on something. It just actually plays the first video the second you open it, which none of the other apps do, right? And the, the point of that is that causes you to enter into this engagement stream even faster. So this is this... again, this race for attention produces things that are not good for society. And even if you took the Whac-A-Mole stick or you took the antitrust case and you whacked Facebook and you got rid of Facebook, or you whack Google or you whack YouTube, you're just gonna have more actors flooding in doing the same thing. And one other example of this is, um, uh, the time it takes to reach, let's say, 10 million followers. So if you remember back in the Ashton... Wasn't it Ashton Kutcher-

Joe Rogan 18:48 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 18:49 ... who raced for the first million followers?

Joe Rogan 18:51 Raced with CNN.

Tristan Harris 18:51 Raced with CNN, right?

Joe Rogan 18:51 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 18:52 So now, if you think of it, the companies are competing for our attention, if they find out that, um, each of us becoming a celebrity and having a million people we get to reach, if that's the currency of the thing that gets us to come back to get more attention, then they're competing at who can give us that bigger fame lottery hit faster. So let's say 2009 or 2010 when Ashton Kutcher did that, it took him... I don't know how long it took. Months to, for him to get a million?

Joe Rogan 19:18 I don't, I don't remember.

Tristan Harris 19:18 It was a, it was a little bit though, right? Um, and then TikTok comes along and says, "Hey, we want to give kids the ability to hit the fame lottery and make it big, hit the jackpot even faster." We want you to be able to go from zero to a million followers in 10 days, right? And so they're competing to make that shorter and shorter and shorter. And I, I know about this 'cause, you know, speaking from a Silicon Valley perspective, uh, venture capitalists fund these new social platforms based on how fast they can get to, like, 100 million users. There was this famous line that, like, I forgot what it was, but I think Facebook took, like, 10 years to get to 100 million users. Instagram took, you know, I don't know, four years, three years or something like that. TikTok can get there even faster. And so it's shortening, shortening, shortening. And that's what people are, are... that's what we're competing for. It's like who can win the fame lottery faster, but is a world where everyone broadcasts to millions of people without the responsibilities of publishers, journalists, et cetera. Does that produce an information environment that's help- that, that's, that's healthy? And obviously the, the film, The Social Dilemma, is really about how it makes the worst of us rise to the top, right? So our, our hate, our outrage, our polarization, um, what we disagree about, black and white thinking, more conspiracy-oriented views of the world, QAnon, you know, Facebook groups, things like that. And I, I can, we can definitely go into... there's a lot of legitimate conspiracy theories, so I want to make sure I'm not categorically dismissing stuff. Um, but that's really the point, is that we have landed in a world where the things that we are paying attention to are not necessarily the agenda of topics that we would say in a reflective world, what we would say is the most, most important.

Joe Rogan 20:52 So there's a lot of... there's a lot of conversation about free will and about letting people choose whatever they ch- wha- wha- whatever they enjoy viewing and watching and paying attention to. But when you're talking about these incredibly potent algorithms and the incredibly potent, uh, addictions that people... that, that people develop to these, these things, and we're, we're pretending that people should have the ability to just ignore it and put it away.

Tristan Harris 21:26 Right.

Joe Rogan 21:26 And-

Tristan Harris 21:27 Use your willpower, Joe.

Joe Rogan 21:27 Yeah, that seems... I have a folder-

Tristan Harris 21:29 Have your kids use your willpower.

Joe Rogan 21:30 I have a folder on my phone called ADDICT, and it's all, all caps, and it's at the end of my all... you have to scroll through all my other apps to get to it.

Tristan Harris 21:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 21:38 And so if I want to get to Twitter or, uh, Instagram, I gotta go there.

Tristan Harris 21:41 The problem is that the app switcher will put it in the most recent. So once you switch apps and you have Twitter in a recents, it'll be right there, so that's the problem is if you... yeah.

Joe Rogan 21:48 If I want to go left and yeah. If I want to see that, yeah, you can do that. Yeah, it's, um, it's insanely addictive. And, uh, if you can control yourself, it's not that big a deal, but how many people can control themselves?

Tristan Harris 22:04 Well, I think the, the, the thing we have to hone in on is the asymmetry of power. Um, you know, as I say in the film, it's like we're bringing this ancient brain hardware, the prefrontal cortex, which is like what you use to do, um, goal-directed action, self-control, willpower, holding back, you know, marshmallow test, don't do the... don't get the marshmallow now, wait later for the two marshmallows later. All of that is through our prefrontal cortex. And when you're sitting there and you think, "Okay, I'm gonna go watch... I'm gonna look at this one thing on Facebook because my friend invited me to this event, or it's this one post I have to look at," and the next thing you know, you find yourself scrolling through the thing for, like, an hour.

Joe Rogan 22:42 Right.

Tristan Harris 22:42 And you say, "Man, that was on me. I should have had more self-control." But they're... behind the screen, behind that glass slab, is, like, a supercomputer pointed at your brain that is predicting the perfect thing to show you next. And you can feel it, like it's... This is really important. So like, if I'm Facebook, when you flick your finger, you think, um, when you're using Facebook, it's just going to show me the next thing that my friend said. But it's not doing that. It... when you flick your finger, it actually literally wakes up this sort of supercomputer avatar voodoo doll version of Joe. And the voodoo doll of Joe is, um, you know, the, the more clicks you've ever made on Facebook is like adding the little hair to the voodoo doll. And the more likes you've ever made adds little clothing to the voodoo doll. And the more, um, you know, watch time on videos you've ever had adds little, um, you know, shoes to the voodoo doll. So the voodoo doll is getting more and more accurate the more things you click on. This is in the film The Social Dilemma.

Joe Rogan 23:35 Right.

Tristan Harris 23:35 Like, if you notice, like, the character, you know, as he's using this thing, uh, it builds a more and more accurate model that the AIs, the three AIs behind the screen are kind of manipulating. And the idea is it can actually predict and prick the voodoo doll with this video or that post from your friends or this other thing, and it'll figure out the right thing to show you that it knows will keep you there, because it's already seen how that same video or that same post has kept 200 million other voodoo dolls there, because you just look like another voodoo doll. So here's an example. And this works the same on all the platforms. If you are... were a teen girl-... and you opened a dieting video on YouTube, um, 70% of YouTube's watch time comes from the recommendations on the right-hand side, right? So the things that are showing recommended videos next. And it will, uh, show you, it'll show... What, what did it show that the, the girls who watched the teen dieting video? It showed anorexia videos because those were better at keeping the teen girls' attention. Not because it said, "These are good for them. These are helpful for them." It just says, "These tend to work at keeping their attention." So again-

Joe Rogan 24:40 These tend to work if you are already watching diet videos?

Tristan Harris 24:43 Yeah. So if you're a 13-year-old girl and you watch the diet video, You- YouTube wakes up its voodoo doll version of that girl and says, "Hey, I've got like 100 million other voodoo dolls of 13-year-old girls," right?

Joe Rogan 24:52 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 24:53 "And they all tend to watch these, these other videos." I don't know what... I just know that they have this word thinspo, thinspiration is the name for it, um-

Joe Rogan 24:59 Really?

Tristan Harris 25:00 ... to be inspired for anorexia. Yeah. It's a real thing. Um, YouTube addressed this problem a couple years ago, but when you let the machine run blind, all it's doing is picking stuff that's engaging.

Joe Rogan 25:09 Why did they choose to not let the machine run blind with one thing, like anorexia? And-

Tristan Harris 25:15 Well, so now we're getting into the Twitter censorship conversation-

Joe Rogan 25:18 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 25:18 ... and the moderation conversation. So the real... This is why I don't focus on censorship and moderation, because the real issue is if you blur your eyes and zoom way out and say, "How does the whole machine tend to operate? Like, no matter what I start with, what is it gonna recommend next?" So, um, you know, if you started with, um, you know, a, a World War II video, YouTube would recommend a bunch of Holocaust denial videos, right? If you started, um, teen girls with a dieting video, it would recommend these anorexia videos. Uh, in Facebook's case, if you joined... There's, there's so many different examples here because Facebook recommends groups to people based on what it thinks is most engaging for you. So if you were a new mom, you had Renee DiResta, my friend, uh, on this podcast.

Joe Rogan 26:00 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 26:00 We've done a bunch of work together, and she has this great example of, as a new mom, she joined one Facebook group, uh, for mothers who do do-it-yourself baby food, like organic baby food. And then Facebook has this sidebar. It says, "Here's some other groups you might recommend, you, you might want to join." And what do you think was the most engaging of those? Because Facebook, again, is picking on, "Which group, if I got you to join it, would cause you to spend the most time here," right? So for some do-it-yourself baby food groups, which group do you think it selected?

Joe Rogan 26:29 Probably something about vaccines.

Tristan Harris 26:31 Exactly. So-

Joe Rogan 26:31 Really?

Tristan Harris 26:31 ... anti-vaccines for moms. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:33 Ah.

Tristan Harris 26:34 Okay, so then if you join that group, now it does the same, run the process again. So then, so now look at Facebook. So it says, "Hey, I've got these voodoo dolls. I've got like 100 million voodoo dolls and they're all, they just joined this anti-vaccine moms group." And then what do they tend to engage with for a very long time if I get them to join these other groups? Which of those other groups would show up?

Joe Rogan 26:53 I don't know.

Tristan Harris 26:54 Chemtrails.

Joe Rogan 26:55 Oh, okay.

Tristan Harris 26:56 The Pizzagate.

Joe Rogan 26:57 Flat Earth?

Tristan Harris 26:57 Flat Earth, absolutely. Yup. And YouTube recommended... So I'm interchangeably going from YouTube to Facebook because it's the same dynamic. They're competing for attention, and YouTube recommended flat Earth conspiracy theories hundreds of millions of times.

Joe Rogan 27:12 (laughs)

Tristan Harris 27:12 And so when you, when you're a parent during COVID and you sit your kids in front of YouTube because you're like, "I'm, I've got to... This is the digital pacifier. Got to let them do their thing, I got to do work."

Joe Rogan 27:21 Right.

Tristan Harris 27:21 And then you come back to the dinner table and your kid says, "You know, the Holocaust didn't happen and the Earth is flat," and people are wondering why, it's because of this. And now to your point about this sort of moderation thing, we can take the Whac-A-Mole stick after the public yells and Renee and I, you know, make a bunch of noise or something, and a large community, by the way, of people making noise about this. And they'll say, "Okay, shoot. You're right. Flat Earth, we got to deal with that." And so they'll, they'll tweak the algorithm. And then people make a bunch of noise about the thinspiration videos for, uh, anorexia for kids, and they'll deal with that problem. But then they start doing it based reactively. But again, if you zoom out, it's just still recommending stuff that's kind of from the crazy town section of YouTube.

Joe Rogan 28:01 Is the problem the recommendation?

Tristan Harris 28:03 That's... Yeah.

Joe Rogan 28:04 Because I, I, I don't mind that people have ridiculous ideas about hollow Earth because I think it's humorous. But I'm also a 53-year-old man.

Tristan Harris 28:13 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:13 Right? I'm not, I'm not a 12-year-old boy with a limited education that, that is like, "Oh my God, the government's lying to us. There's lizard people that live under the Earth."

Tristan Harris 28:22 Right.

Joe Rogan 28:23 But if that's the, the real argument about these conspiracy theories is that they can influence young people or the easily impressionable or, or people that maybe don't have a sophisticated sense of vetting out bullshit.

Tristan Harris 28:35 Right. Well, and the algorithms aren't making a distinction between who is just laughing at it-

Joe Rogan 28:40 Right.

Tristan Harris 28:41 ... and who's deeply vulnerable to it.

Joe Rogan 28:42 Exactly.

Tristan Harris 28:42 And generally, it's just, it's, it just says who's vulnerable to it, because another example, I, uh, the way I think about this is if you were driving down the highway and, and, you know, there's Facebook and Google trying to figure out, like, "What should I give you based on what tends to keep your attention?" If you look at a car crash, and everybody driving on the highway, they look at the car crash.

Joe Rogan 28:58 Right.

Tristan Harris 28:58 According to Facebook and Google, it's like the whole world wants car crashes, so we should just feed them car crashes after car crashes-

Joe Rogan 29:03 Hmm.

Tristan Harris 29:03 ... after car crashes. And what the algorithms do, as Guillaume Chaslot in the film says, who's the YouTube, uh, whistleblower, uh, for the YouTube recommendation system, is they find the perfect little rabbit hole for you that it knows will keep you there for five hours.

Joe Rogan 29:16 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 29:16 And the conspiracy theory, like, dark corners of YouTube were the, the dark corners that tends to keep people there for five hours. And so you have to realize that we're now something like 10 years in to this vast psychology experiment where it's been, you know, in every language in hundreds of countries, right? In every... In hundreds of languages. It's been steering people towards the crazy town. Uh, when I say crazy town, I think of, you know, imagine there's a spectrum on YouTube, and there's on one side you have, like, the calm Walter Cronkite, Carl Sagan, you know, slow, you know, kind of boring, but, like, educational material or something. And then the other side of the spectrum, you have, you know, the craziest stuff you can find. Um, crazy town. No matter where you start, you could start in Walter Cronkite or you could start in crazy town, but if I'm YouTube and I want you to watch more, am I gonna steer you towards the calm stuff or am I gonna steer you more towards crazy town?

Joe Rogan 30:10 Crazy Town.

Tristan Harris 30:10 ... always more towards Crazy Town. So then you imagine just tilting the floor of humanity, just by like three degrees, right? And then you just w- step back and you let society run its course. As Jaron Lanier says in the film, "If you just tilt society by one degree, two degrees, that's the whole world." That's the, that's what everyone is thinking and believing. And so if you look at the, at the degree to which people are deep into rabbit hole conspiracy thinking right now ... And again, I wanna acknowledge COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird. We ... Like, there's a, a lot of real stuff, right?

Joe Rogan 30:39 Right.

Tristan Harris 30:39 So I'm not categorically dismissing it, but we're asking, what is the basis upon which we're believing the things we are about the world?

Joe Rogan 30:47 (sighs)

Tristan Harris 30:47 And increasingly, that's, that's based on technology. And we can get into, you know, what's going on in Portland. Well, the only way I know that is I'm looking at my social media feed, and according to that, it looks like the entire city's on fire and it's a war zone. But if you ... I called a friend there the other day, and he said, "It's a beautiful day. There's, there's actually no violence anywhere near where I am. It's just like these two blocks or something like that."

Joe Rogan 31:06 Right.

Tristan Harris 31:07 And, and this is the thing, it's warping our view of reality. And, and I think that's what really, for me, The Social Dilemma's, was really trying to accomplish as a film, and, uh, you know, the director, Jeff Orlowski, was trying to accomplish, is, is how did this society get, go crazy everywhere all at once, you know, seemingly? You know, they was ... This didn't happen by accident. It happened by design of this business model.

Joe Rogan 31:29 When did the business model get implemented? Like when did they start using these algorithms to recommend things? 'Cause initially YouTube was just a series of videos and it didn't have that recommended-

Tristan Harris 31:38 Correct.

Joe Rogan 31:39 ... section. When was that?

Tristan Harris 31:41 You know, it's a good question. I mean, I, um ... You know, they ... Originally YouTube was just post a video and you can get people to, you know-

Joe Rogan 31:48 Right.

Tristan Harris 31:48 ... uh, go to that URL and send it around. Uh, they needed to figure out ... O- once the competition for attention got more intense, they needed to, to figure out, how am I gonna keep you there? And so recommending those videos on the right-hand side, I think that was there pretty early if I remember, actually. Um, because that's, that was some of the innovation is like keeping people within this YouTube wormhole. And once people were in the YouTube wormhole constantly seeing videos, that was what the, they could v-, they could g-, offer the promise to a new video uploader, "Hey, if you post it here, you're gonna get way more views than if you post it on Vimeo." Right? And that's, that's the thing. If I open up TikTok right now on my phone-

Joe Rogan 32:24 Do you have TikTok on your phone?

Tristan Harris 32:25 Um, (laughs) well, I'm not supposed to, obviously, but more for research purposes. Um-

Joe Rogan 32:30 Ah, research.

Tristan Harris 32:31 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:31 Do you-

Tristan Harris 32:32 Um-

Joe Rogan 32:32 ... know how to TikTok at all?

Tristan Harris 32:33 No, I don't. I-

Joe Rogan 32:33 Okay. My 12-year-old's obsessed.

Tristan Harris 32:35 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 32:36 Oh, yeah. She can't even sit around. If she's standing still for f- five minutes, she just starts like ...

Tristan Harris 32:41 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:42 She starts TikTok-ing.

Tristan Harris 32:44 And that's the thing. I mean they have-

Joe Rogan 32:45 2012.

Tristan Harris 32:45 2012.

Joe Rogan 32:46 Oh, so the Mayans were right.

Narrator 32:47 (laughs)

Tristan Harris 32:48 Right. (laughs)

Joe Rogan 32:48 2012, the platform announced an update to the Discovery system, uh, designed to identify the videos people actually want to watch by prioritizing videos that hold attention throughout, as well as increasing the amount of time a user spends on the platform overall. YouTobe- YouTube could assure advertisers that it was providing a valuable high quality experience for people.

Tristan Harris 33:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 33:08 (sniffs) So, um, that, that's beginning of the end.

Tristan Harris 33:11 Yeah. So 2012 on YouTube's timeline, I mean, um, you know, the Twitter and Facebook world, I think introduces the retweet and reshare buttons in the 2009 to 2010 kind of time period. So you end up with this world where the things that we're most paying attention to are based on algorithms choosing for us. And so this sort of deeper argument that's in the film that I'm not sure everyone picks up on is these technology systems have taken control of human choice. They've taken control of humanity because they're controlling the information that all of us are getting.

Joe Rogan 33:46 Right.

Tristan Harris 33:46 Think about every election. Like, um, I think of Facebook as kind of a voting machine, but it's a sort of indirect voting machine because it controls the information for four years that your entire, entire society is getting, and then everyone votes based on that information. Now you could say, "Well, hold on. Radio and television were there and were partisan before that." But actually, TV, um, radio and TV are often getting their news stories from Twitter, and Twitter is rec-, is recommending things based on these algorithms. So-

Joe Rogan 34:13 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 34:14 ... when you control the information that an entire population is getting, you're controlling their choices. I mean, literally in military theory, if I wanna m- screw up your military, I wanna control the information that it's getting. I wanna confuse the enemy, and that information funnel is the very thing that's been corrupted, and it's like the Flint water supply for our minds.

Joe Rogan 34:31 I was talking to a friend yesterday, and she was saying that there were articles that, uh ... She was laughing that there's articles that are written about negative tweets that random people make about, uh, a celebrity doing this or that.

Tristan Harris 34:46 Uh-huh.

Joe Rogan 34:46 And she was like l- ... And she was quoting this article. She's like, "Look how crazy this is." This is a whole article that's written about someone who decided to say something negative about some- something some celebrity had done, and then it becomes this huge art- ... And then the tweets are prominently featured.

Tristan Harris 35:02 Right. And it's con-

Joe Rogan 35:02 And then the response to those t- I mean, like, like really, like arbitrary, like weird-

Tristan Harris 35:07 Well, because it's a values-blind system that just cares about what will get attention. You know-

Joe Rogan 35:10 Exactly.

Tristan Harris 35:11 It-

Joe Rogan 35:11 And that's what the article was.

Tristan Harris 35:12 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 35:12 It was just an attention grab.

Tristan Harris 35:14 It, it's interesting 'cause, um, uh, Prince Harry and Meghan have, have become very interested in these issues and are actively working on these issues, and, um, getting to know them just a little bit.

Joe Rogan 35:22 Are they really?

Tristan Harris 35:23 Y- Well, they're, they-

Joe Rogan 35:24 Because it affects them personally?

Tristan Harris 35:25 Well, it's, it's actually interesting. I, I mean, I don't wanna speak for them, but, um, I think Meghan has been the target of the most vitriol hate-oriented stuff on the planet, right? From just the amount of sort of criticism that they, that they get-

Joe Rogan 35:37 Really?

Tristan Harris 35:37 ... and scrutiny. Yeah. She, I mean, she's just c- Like newsfeed's filled with hate about just what she looks like, what she says, just constantly. And I-

Joe Rogan 35:44 Boy, I'm out of the loop. I've, I've never seen anything. She's-

Tristan Harris 35:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:46 ... pretty. Uh, what do they say that she looks like?

Tristan Harris 35:48 I, honestly, I don't follow it mi- myself 'cause I don't fall into these attention traps. I try not to. But e- people ... She just faces the worst vitriol. I mean, this is the thing with teen bullying, right? So I think they work on these issues because teenagers are now getting a micro version of this thing where each of us are scrutinized.

Joe Rogan 36:03 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 36:03 You know? And I think that's what's not ... I mean, think about what celebrity status does and, and screw, how it screws up humans in general, right? Like take an average celebrity, like it warps your mind, it warps your psychology, and you get scrutiny, right? When you suddenly are followed, each person gets thousands or project forward into the future a few years-... each of us have, you know, th- tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people that are following what we say. That's a lot of feedback. And, you know, as Jonathan Haidt says in the film, and I know you've had him here-

Joe Rogan 36:30 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 36:31 ... you know, it's made kids much more cautious and, and less risk-taking, and, um, and more bullied overall. And, um, there's, it's just huge problems in mental health around this.

Joe Rogan 36:40 Yeah, it's really bad for young girls, right? Um, for, for celebrities-

Tristan Harris 36:44 Especially 10 to 14-year-olds when, when this-

Joe Rogan 36:45 ... and I've had quite a few celebrities in here and we've discussed it, I just tell them that you can't read that stuff.

Tristan Harris 36:51 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 36:51 Just don't read it.

Tristan Harris 36:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:52 Like, there's no good in it. Like, I had a friend, um, she did a show, she's a comedian, she did a show, and she was talking about this one negative comment that was inaccurate, you know, that said she only did a half an hour and her show sucked. She's like, "Fuck her," and this and that. And I go, I go, "Why are you reading that?" She's like, "'Cause it's mostly positive." I go, "But how come you're not talking about most of it then?" You're talking about this one person.

Tristan Harris 37:13 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 37:14 This one negative person. We were both laughing about it. Like, she's, she's healthy, you know?

Tristan Harris 37:18 Right.

Joe Rogan 37:18 She's not, she's not completely fucked up by it, but this one person got into her head. I'm like, "I'm telling you, it's not... The juice is not worth the squeeze." But don't read those things.

Tristan Harris 37:27 But this is, this is exactly right, and this is based on how our minds work. I mean, our minds-

Joe Rogan 37:31 Yes.

Tristan Harris 37:31 ... literally have something called negativity bias. So if you have 100 comments and 99 are positive and one is negative, just a- where does the average human's mind go?

Joe Rogan 37:39 Right.

Tristan Harris 37:40 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 37:40 They go to the negative, yes.

Tristan Harris 37:41 And, and it also goes to the negative even when you shut down the screen. Your mind is sitting there looping on that negative comment.

Joe Rogan 37:46 Right.

Tristan Harris 37:46 And why? Because evolutionarily, it's really important that we look at social approval, negative social approval, because our reputation is at stake in the tribe.

Joe Rogan 37:54 Yes.

Tristan Harris 37:54 So it matters.

Joe Rogan 37:55 Yes.

Tristan Harris 37:56 But it's never been easier now for not just that, that one comment to sort of gain more airtime, but then for that to build a hate mob, and then to see the interconnected clicks, and I can go in and see 10 other people that responded to that that are negative.

Joe Rogan 38:07 Yes.

Tristan Harris 38:08 And so especially when you have teenagers that are exposed to this, and you can keep going down the tree and see all of the hate fest on you, this is the psychological environment that is the default way that kids are growing up now.

Joe Rogan 38:20 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 38:20 I, I actually faced this recently with, with the film itself, because actually, the film has gotten just crazy positive acclaim for the most part, and there's just a few, you know, negative comments. And for myself even, right? Like-

Joe Rogan 38:32 Here comes a conjunction, but...

Tristan Harris 38:33 (laughs) I was glued to a few negative comments. And I... And then you could click-

Joe Rogan 38:38 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 38:38 ... and you would see other people that you know who positively like or respond to those comments. You're like, "Why did that person say that-"

Joe Rogan 38:44 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 38:44 "... negative thing? I thought we were friends." That whole kind of psychology, and we're all vulnerable to it.

Joe Rogan 38:49 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 38:49 Unless you learn as, as you said, to tell your celebrity friends-

Joe Rogan 38:52 Even-

Tristan Harris 38:52 "... Just don't pay attention to it."

Joe Rogan 38:53 Even mild stuff, I see people fixate on.

Tristan Harris 38:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:56 Even a m- mild disagreement or mild criticism, people fixate on. And it's, um, it's, it's also a problem because you realize that someone's saying this and you're not there and you can't defend yourself, so you have this like-

Tristan Harris 39:08 Exactly.

Joe Rogan 39:08 ... feeling of helplessness. Like, "Hey, that's not true."

Tristan Harris 39:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 39:11 "I didn't..." And then you, you don't get it out of your system.

Tristan Harris 39:15 Right.

Joe Rogan 39:15 You never, you never get to express it.

Tristan Harris 39:17 And people can share that false negative stuff. I mean, I didn't-

Joe Rogan 39:19 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 39:20 Not all negative stuff is false, but you can assert things and build on the hate fest, right? And start going crazy and saying, "This person's a white supremacist," or that, "This person's even worse." And that'll spread to thousands and thousands of people, and next thing you know, you check into your feed again at, you know, 8:00 PM that night and you, your whole reputation has been destroyed-

Joe Rogan 39:38 Yes.

Tristan Harris 39:38 ... and you didn't even know what happened to you.

Joe Rogan 39:40 Well, do you-

Tristan Harris 39:40 And this is happening to teenagers too. I mean, they're anxious. Like, I'll post... You know, a teenager will post a photo, uh, with their high school, they make a dumb comment without thinking about it, and then next thing they know, you know, at the end of the day, the parents are all calling because like 300 parents saw it-

Joe Rogan 39:53 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 39:53 ... and are calling up the, the parent of that kid. And it, it j- it's... You know, we talk to teachers a lot in our work at the Center for Humane Technology, and they, um, will say that on Monday morning, this is before COVID, but on Monday morning, they spend the first, like, hour of class having to clear all the drama that happened on social media from the weekend, for the kids.

Joe Rogan 40:11 Jesus.

Tristan Harris 40:12 And (sighs) again, like, this-

Joe Rogan 40:15 And these kids are in what age group?

Tristan Harris 40:17 This was like eighth, nine, ninth, tenth grade, that kind of thing.

Joe Rogan 40:20 Oh, and the, the other problem with these kids is there's not like a, a long history of people growing up through this kind of influence and successfully navigating it.

Tristan Harris 40:32 No.

Joe Rogan 40:32 These are the fir-... These are the pioneers.

Tristan Harris 40:34 Yeah, and, and they won't know anything different, which is why, you know-

Joe Rogan 40:37 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 40:37 ... we talk about in the film. Like, this... They're growing up in this environment.

Joe Rogan 40:41 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 40:41 And, you know, one of the simplest principles of ethics, um, uh, is the ethics of symmetry. Doing unto others as you would do to yourself. And as we say at the end of the film, like, one of the easiest ways you know that there's a problem here is that many of the executives at the social media tech companies don't let their own kids use social media.

Joe Rogan 41:00 Right. With Steve Jobs, you know-

Tristan Harris 41:01 They literally say at the end of the film, like-

Joe Rogan 41:02 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 41:02 ... "It's a... We have a rule about it, we're religious about it, we don't do it."

Joe Rogan 41:05 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 41:05 The CEO of Lunchables Foods didn't let his own kids eat Lunchables.

Joe Rogan 41:09 (sighs)

Tristan Harris 41:10 That's when you know. If you talk to a doctor or a lawyer... A doctor, and you say, you know, "Would you get this surgery for your own kid?" They say, "Oh, no, I would never do that." (laughs) Like, would you trust that doctor?

Joe Rogan 41:19 Right.

Tristan Harris 41:20 And it's the same thing for a lawyer, uh, so this is the relationship where we have a relationship of asymmetry, and technology is influencing all of us, and we need a system by which... You know, when I was growing up, um, you know, I grew up on the Macintosh and technology and I was creatively doing programming projects and whatever else. The people who built the technology I was using would have their own kids use the things that I was using, 'cause they were creative-

Joe Rogan 41:42 Right.

Tristan Harris 41:42 ... and they were about tools and empowerment, and that's what's changed. We don't have that anymore-

Joe Rogan 41:46 Right.

Tristan Harris 41:46 ... because the business model took over. And so instead of having just tools sitting there like hammers waiting to be used to build, you know, creative projects or programming to invent things or paintbrushes or whatever, we now have a manipulation-based technology environment where everything you use has this incentive to not only addict you but to have you play the fame lottery, get social feedback, because those are all the things that keep people's attention.

Joe Rogan 42:09 Isn't this also a problem with these information technologies being attached to corporations that have this philosophy of unlimited growth?

Tristan Harris 42:16 Yes.

Joe Rogan 42:16 So they're, they're... No matter how much they make... I, I'm, I applaud Apple-... because I think they are the only company that takes steps to protect privacy, to, uh, block advertisements, to make sure that, e- e- it, at least, like, when you, when you use their maps application, they're not saving your data and sending it to everybody. And it's one of the reasons why Apple Maps is really not as good-

Tristan Harris 42:41 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:42 ... as Google Maps.

Tristan Harris 42:43 Right.

Joe Rogan 42:43 But, uh, I use it, and that's one of the reasons why I use it. And when Apple came out recently and there was, um, they were doing something to, uh, to, to block your, uh, information being, uh, sent to other places. And they, uh, I forget, what, what was the exact thing that it was-

Tristan Harris 43:06 In the new iOS they released a thing that blocks the tracking identifiers.

Joe Rogan 43:10 That's right.

Tristan Harris 43:10 And it's not actually out yet. It's gonna be out in January or February, I think someone told me. And that, what that's do, that's a good example of they're putting a tax on the advertising industry, because just by saying you can't track people individually, that, you know, takes down the value of an advertisement-

Joe Rogan 43:25 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 43:25 ... by, like, 30% or something.

Joe Rogan 43:27 Here it is. It pops up when I- And you c- When I do Safari, (clears throat) I get this little privacy report thing- Right. ... that says it's like in the last seven days it's prevented 125 trackers from profiling me.

Tristan Harris 43:36 Right.

Joe Rogan 43:36 Yeah. And you can opt out of that if you'd like. If you're like, "No, fuck that. Track me."

Tristan Harris 43:40 Yep.

Joe Rogan 43:41 You, you can do that if you want to. Yeah. You can, you can let them send your data. But that, that seems to me a much more ethical approach, to be able to decide whether or not these companies get your information.

Tristan Harris 43:51 I mean, those things are great. Um, the challenge is imagine you get the privacy equation perfectly right and you-

Joe Rogan 43:57 Look at this. "Apple working on its own search engine as Google ties-"

Tristan Harris 44:00 Oh, yeah. I saw this.

Joe Rogan 44:01 "... could be cut soon." I started using DuckDuckGo-

Tristan Harris 44:04 Yep.

Joe Rogan 44:05 ... for that very reason, just 'cause it's, it, they don't do anything with it.

Tristan Harris 44:08 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 44:08 They don't e- they give you the information, but they don't, they don't take your data and, and do anything with it.

Tristan Harris 44:14 The, the challenge is let's say we get all the privacy stuff perfectly, perfectly right, and data production and data controls and all that stuff. In a system that's still based on attention and grabbing attention and harvesting and strip mining our brains, uh, you still get maximum polarization, addiction, mental health problems, isolation, teen depression and suicide, um, polarization, breakdown of truth. Right?

Joe Rogan 44:39 Right.

Tristan Harris 44:39 So that's... We really focus in our work, uh, on those topics because that's the direct influence of the business model on warping society. Like, we need to name this mind warp. We think of it like the climate change of culture, that, you know, when y- these seem like, these seem like different disconnected topics, much like with climate change that you'd say, like, "Okay, we've got species lost in the Amazon. We've got, we're losing insects. We've got melting glaciers. We've got, uh, ocean acidification. We've got the coral reefs, you know, uh, getting, dying." These can feel like disconnected things until you have a unified model of how emissions change all those different phenomena. Right? In the social fabric, we have shortening of attention spans. We have more outrage-driven news media. We have more polarization. Um, we have more breakdown of truth. We have more conspiracy-minded thinking. These seem like separate events, uh, and separate phenomena, but they're actually all part of this attention extraction paradigm that the company's growth, as you said, depends on extracting more of our attention, which means more polarization, more extreme material, more conspiracy thinking, and shortening attention spans. 'Cause it, we, we also say, like, you know, "If we want to double the size of the attention economy, I want your attention, Joe, to be split into two separate streams. Like, I want you watching the TV, uh, the tablet, and the phone at the same time, because now I've tripled the size of the amount of extractable attention that I can get for advertisers, which means that by fracking for attention and splitting you into more junk," (laughs) you know, "attention that's, like, thinner, we can sell that as if it's real attention." It's like the financial crisis where you're selling thinner and thinner financial assets as if it's real, but it's really just a junk asset.

Joe Rogan 46:17 Oh, wow. (laughs)

Tristan Harris 46:17 And that's kind of where we are now, where it's sort of the junk attention economy-

Joe Rogan 46:21 Right.

Tristan Harris 46:21 ... because we, we're, we can shorten attention spans and we're debasing the substrate of, that, that makes up our society. 'Cause everything in a democracy depends on individual sense-making and meaningful choice, meaningful free will, meaningful independent views. But if that's all basically sold to the highest bidder, that debases the soil from which independent views grow, because all of us are jacked into this sort of matrix of social media manipulation. That's, that's ruining and degrading our democracy. And that's really, uh, there's many other things that are ruining and degrading our democracy, but that's, that's a sort of invisible force that's upstream that affects every other thing downstream, because if we can't agree on what's true, for example, you can't solve any problem. I think that's what you talked about in your ten-minute thing on The Social Dilemma I think I saw on YouTube.

Joe Rogan 47:04 Yeah. Um, do, your organization highlights all these issues in, you know, in an amazing way, and it's very important. But do you have any solutions?

Tristan Harris 47:16 (sighs) It, it's hard. Right?

Joe Rogan 47:18 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 47:18 So I just wanna say that this is as, is a complex a problem as climate change, um, in the sense that you need to change the business mod-... I think of it like we're on the fossil fuel economy and we have to switch to some kind of beyond that thing. Right? Because so long as the business models of these companies depend on extracting attention, can you expect them to do something different? Like-

Joe Rogan 47:41 You can't, but how could you, is it, I mean, there's so much money involved.

Tristan Harris 47:46 Correct.

Joe Rogan 47:46 And now, they've accumulated so much wealth that they have an amazing amount of influence.

Tristan Harris 47:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 47:52 You know? And-

Tristan Harris 47:54 And the asymmetric influence can buy lobbyists, can influence-

Joe Rogan 47:56 Yes. Yeah.

Tristan Harris 47:56 ... Congress and prevent things from happening. So this is why it's kind of the last moment-

Joe Rogan 48:00 And they're protecting themselves.

Tristan Harris 48:00 That's right. But, you know, I think we're seeing signs of real change. We had the antitrust case that was just filed against Google, um, in Congress. We're seeing more hearings that are gonna happen than ever-

Joe Rogan 48:09 What was the basis of that case?

Tristan Harris 48:11 You know, to be honest, I, uh, was actually (laughs) in the middle of, uh, The Social Dilemma launch when I think that happened and our f- our, my home burned down in the recent fires in Santa Rosa-

Joe Rogan 48:19 Oh, no.

Tristan Harris 48:19 So I actually missed, uh, that happening.

Joe Rogan 48:21 Sorry to hear that.

Tristan Harris 48:22 Yeah, sorry, that was a big thing to drop. But yeah, no-

Joe Rogan 48:24 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 48:24 ... it's, it's awful. Uh, there's so much that's been happening in the last six weeks that I've-

Joe Rogan 48:27 I've been, uh, I was evacuated three times where I lived in California.

Tristan Harris 48:30 Oh, really?

Joe Rogan 48:30 Yeah. So w- we... It cut real close to our house. "Justice Department sues monopolist Google for violating antitrust laws. Department files complain against Google to restore competition in search and search advertising markets." Okay, so it's all about search.

Tristan Harris 48:45 Yeah, this is... Right, this was a case that's about Google using its dominant position to privilege its own search engine-

Joe Rogan 48:52 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 48:52 ... um, in its own products and beyond, which is similar to sort of Microsoft bundling in the, uh, Internet Explorer browser. But I, you know, this is all, uh, good progress, but really, it misses the kind of fundamental harm of like, these things are warping our society. They're warping-

Joe Rogan 49:07 Right.

Tristan Harris 49:07 ... how our minds are working. And there's no, you know, congressional action against that, because it's a really hard problem to solve. I think the- the f- the reason the film, for me, is so important is that if I look at the growth rate of how fast, uh, Facebook has been recommending people into conspiracy groups and, um, kind of polarizing us into separate echo chambers, which we should really break down, I think, as well for people, like exactly the mechanics of how that happens. But if you look at the growth rate of all of those harms, compared to, you know, how fast has Congress passed anything to deal with it, like basically not at all-

Joe Rogan 49:40 They seem a little bit unsophisticated in, in that regard. Like they, they-

Tristan Harris 49:44 It might be an understatement, yeah.

Joe Rogan 49:45 Yeah. They, they're not trying to be-

Tristan Harris 49:47 Well-

Joe Rogan 49:47 ... charitable.

Tristan Harris 49:48 I, I, I want to be charitable too, and I want to make sure I call out... I mean, there's Senator Mark Warner, Blumenthal, um, uh, yeah, several other senators we've talked to have been really on top of these issues and led, I think, Senator Warner's white paper, um, on how to regulate the tech platforms. It was one of the best. It's from two years ago, in 2018. Uh, and Raffi Martine, his staffer, is, uh, an amazing human being. He's worked very hard on these issues. So there, there are some good folks, but when you look at the broad, like the hearing yesterday, it's mostly grandstanding to politicize the issue, right? 'Cause you, you turn it into, on the right, um, "Hey, you're censoring conservatives," and on the left, it's, "Hey, you're not taking down enough misinformation and dealing with the hate speech and all these kinds of things."

Joe Rogan 50:26 Right.

Tristan Harris 50:27 And they're not actually dealing with, how would we solve this problem? They're just trying to make a political point to win over their base.

Joe Rogan 50:33 Now, the, Facebook recently banned the QAnon pages, which, uh, I thought was kind of fascinating. 'Cause I'm like, well, this is a weird sort of slippery slope, isn't it? Like, if you decide that you... I mean, it s- it almost seemed to me like, well, we'll throw them a bone. We'll get rid of QAnon, 'cause it's so preposterous. Let's just get rid of that. But what else... L- like, if you keep going down that rabbit hole, where do you draw the line? Like, where, l- uh... Are you allowed to have JFK conspiracy theories? Are you allowed to have flat Earth? Are you allowed-

Tristan Harris 51:05 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 51:05 I mean, it... I guess flat Earth is not dangerous? Is that where they make the distinction?

Tristan Harris 51:09 Yeah. So I think their policy is evolving in the direction of when things are causing offline harm, when online content is known to precede offline harm, that's when the platform... That's the standard by which platforms are acting.

Joe Rogan 51:23 What, um, what offline harm has been caused by the QAnon stuff? Do you know?

Tristan Harris 51:27 Um, there's several incidents. We interviewed a guy on our podcast about it. Um, there's some armed, at gunpoint type thing. I can't remember.

Joe Rogan 51:34 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 51:34 Um, uh, and there's, there's things that are priming people to be violent, you know. Um, uh, w- uh... These are... I just want to say, these are really tricky topics, right? I think what I want to make sure we get to, though, is that there are many people manipulating the groupthink that can happen in these echo chambers. Because once you're in one of these things... Like, I studied cults earlier in my career, and the power of cults is like they're a vertically integrated persuasion stack. Because they control your social relationships. They control who you're hearing from and who you're not hearing from. They give you meaning, purpose, and belonging. They, um, uh, they have a custom language. They have an internal way of referring to things. And social media allows you to create this sort of decentralized cult factory, where, um, it's easier to grab people into an echo chamber where they only hear from other people's views. And Facebook, I think even just recently announced that they're gonna be promoting more of the Facebook Group content into feeds, which means that they're actually gonna make it easier for that kind of manipulation to happen. Um-

Joe Rogan 52:33 But do they make the distinction between group content and conspiracy groups? Like, how do you, how do you... When, when, when does group content... When does it cross a line?

Tristan Harris 52:45 I don't know. I mean, the, the policy teams that work on this are coming up with their own standards, so I'm not familiar with it. If you think about... You know, think about how hard it is to come up with a law at the federal level that all states will agree to. Then you imagine Facebook trying to come up with a policy that will be universal to all the countries that are-

Joe Rogan 53:04 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 53:04 ... running Facebook, right?

Joe Rogan 53:05 Well, then you imagine how you take a company that never thought they were gonna be in the position to do that-

Tristan Harris 53:10 Correct.

Joe Rogan 53:10 ... and then within a decade, they become the most prominent source of news and information on the planet Earth-

Tristan Harris 53:15 Correct.

Joe Rogan 53:16 ... and now they have to regulate it.

Tristan Harris 53:17 And, and, you know, I actually believe Zuckerberg when he says, "I don't want to make these decisions. I shouldn't be in this role where my-"

Joe Rogan 53:24 Right.

Tristan Harris 53:24 "... beliefs decide the whole world's views."

Joe Rogan 53:26 Right. I believe him as well.

Tristan Harris 53:27 He genuinely believes that.

Joe Rogan 53:28 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 53:29 Um, and, and to be fair to all of that... But the problem is he created a situation where he is now in that position. I mean, he got there very quickly, and they did it aggressively when they went into countries like Myanmar, Ethiopia, uh, all throughout the African continent where they gave... Do you know about f- uh, FreeBasics?

Joe Rogan 53:43 No.

Tristan Harris 53:43 So this is the program that I think has gotten something like 700 million, um, accounts onto Facebook, where they do a deal with like a telecommunications provider, like a- their version of AT&T in Myanmar or something. So when you get your smartphone, it comes-

Joe Rogan 53:57 Facebook's built-in.

Tristan Harris 53:58 Facebook's built-in.

Joe Rogan 53:58 Yes, I do know about that.

Tristan Harris 53:59 And there's a, uh, asymmetry of, uh, access where it's free to access Facebook, but it costs money to do the other things-

Joe Rogan 54:06 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 54:06 ... so, for the data plan. So you get a free Facebook account. Facebook is the internet, basically, 'cause it's the free thing you can do on your phone. And then there's... We know that there's fake information that's being spread there.

Joe Rogan 54:18 So the data doesn't apply to Facebook use?

Tristan Harris 54:20 Yeah, I think like the cost, like you know how we pay for data here?

Joe Rogan 54:23 Uh-huh.

Tristan Harris 54:23 Like the... I think you don't pay for Facebook, but you do pay for all the other things, which creates-

Joe Rogan 54:27 Oh, wow.

Tristan Harris 54:28 ... an asymmetry where you're... of course you're gonna use Facebook for most things.

Joe Rogan 54:31 Right. So you have Facebook Messenger-

Tristan Harris 54:33 Yeah. And WhatsApp.

Joe Rogan 54:34 ... video calls.

Tristan Harris 54:35 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 54:35 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 54:35 Um-

Joe Rogan 54:35 WhatsApp.

Tristan Harris 54:36 I don't know exactly with video, because different-... levels of ac-

Joe Rogan 54:38 Facebook has video calls as well, right?

Tristan Harris 54:40 In general, they do, yeah. I just don't know how that works in the developing world. But there's a joke within Facebook, where, I mean, this has caused genocides, right? So in Myanmar, which is in the film, um, the Rohingya Muslim minority group, um, many, uh, Rohingya were persecuted and murdered because of fake information spread by the government, um, on Facebook using their asymmetric knowledge with fake accounts. I mean, even just a couple weeks ago, Facebook took down a network of, I think, several hundred thousand fake accounts in Myanmar, and they didn't even have, at the time, more than something like four or five people in their extended Facebook network who even spoke the language of that country.

Joe Rogan 55:16 Oh, God.

Tristan Harris 55:16 So when you realize that this is like the... I think of, like, the Iraq War Col- Colin Powell Pottery Barn rule, where like, you know, if you go in and you f- break it, then you are responsible for fixing it. This is Facebook actively doing deals to go into Ethiopia, to go into Myanmar, to go into the Philippines or whatever, and providing these solutions, and then it breaks the society, and they're, they're now in a position where they have to fix it. There's actually a joke within Facebook that if you want to know which countries will be "at risk" in two years from now, look at which ones have Facebook Free Basics.

Joe Rogan 55:51 Jesus.

Tristan Harris 55:53 And then you-

Joe Rogan 55:53 That's terrifying that they do that and they don't have very many people that even speak the language. So they, th- th- there's no way they're gonna be able to filter it.

Tristan Harris 55:59 That's right. And so now, if you take it back, I know we were talking outside about the congressional hearing and Jack Dorsey and the questions from the senator about, "Are you taking down the content from the Ayatollahs or from the Chinese Xinjiang prom- uh, province about the Uighurs?" Uh, you know, when there's sort of speech that leads to offline violence in these other countries. The issue is that these platforms are managing the information commons-

Joe Rogan 56:22 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 56:22 ... for countries they don't even speak the language of.

Joe Rogan 56:25 Right.

Tristan Harris 56:25 And if you think the conspiracy theory sort of dark corners, crazy town of the English internet are bad, and we've to- we've already taken out like hundreds of Whac-A-Mole sticks and they've hired hundreds of policy people and hundreds of engineers to deal with that problem. You go to a country like Ethiopia, where, um, there's something like 90 major, there's 90-something dialects, I think, in the country, and six major languages where one of them is the dominant Facebook sort of language, and then the others get persecuted because they actually don't have, um, uh, they don't have a voice on the platform. This is really important that, um, the people in Myanmar who got persecuted and murdered didn't have to be on Facebook for the fake information spread about them to impact them, for people to go after them, right? So this is the whole, "I can assert something about this minority group." That minority group isn't on Facebook, but if it manipulates the, the, the dominant culture to go, "We have to go kill them," then they can go do it. And the same thing has happened, um, you know, in, in India, uh, where there's videos uploaded about, "Hey, those Muslims..." I think they're called flesh killings, where they'll say that th- these Muslims killed this cow, and in Hindu, um, is it Hinduism? The, the cows are sacred. Um, the, uh... Did I get that right? I've... Um, anyway.

Joe Rogan 57:43 I believe you did.

Tristan Harris 57:44 Yeah. Um, the, uh, th- they will post those. They'll go viral on WhatsApp and say, "We have to go lynch those, uh, Muslims because they killed our sac- the sacred cows." And they went from something like five of those p- happening per year to now hundreds of those happening per year because of fake news being spread, again, on Face- Facebook about them, on WhatsApp about them.

Joe Rogan 58:04 (sighs)

Tristan Harris 58:04 And again, they don't have to be on the platform for this to happen to them, right? So this is critical that... You know, imagine you and I and all... Let's imagine all of your listeners, you know? I don't even know how many you have. Like, tens of millions, right? And we all listen to this conversation. We say, "We don't wanna even use Facebook and Twitter or YouTube." We all still, if you live in the US, still live in a country that everyone else will vote based on everything that they're seeing on these platforms. If you zoom out to the global context, all of us d- we don't use Facebook in Brazil, but if Brazil, which, uh, was heavily sk- the last election was skewed, uh, by Facebook and WhatsApp where something like 87% of people saw at least one of the major fake news stories about Bolsonaro, and he got elected, and you have people in Brazil chanting, "Facebook! Facebook!" when he wins. He wins, and then he sets a new policy to wipe out the Amazon. All of us don't have to be on Facebook to be affected by a, a leader that wipes out the Amazon and, and accelerates climate change timelines because of those interconnected effects. So I, you know, we at the Center for Humane Technology are looking at this from a global perspective where it's not just the US election. Facebook manages something like 80 elections per year. And if you think that they're doing all the monitoring that they are for, you know, English-speaking, American election, most privileged society, now look at the hundreds of other countries that they're operating in. Do you think that they're devoting the same resources to, to the other countries?

Joe Rogan 59:27 This is so crazy. It's like... Is that you, Jamie? What's that weird noise? Do you hear like a squeaky? I heard it too. Yeah.

Tristan Harris 59:35 Maybe it was me.

Joe Rogan 59:36 Uh, no, I don't think it is. Just might be feedback. There it is.

Tristan Harris 59:40 It might be me.

Joe Rogan 59:41 What is that? Is it?

Tristan Harris 59:41 Breathing. I don't know.

Joe Rogan 59:42 I think it was your mask. Yeah. (laughs) You have a-

Tristan Harris 59:43 Well-

Joe Rogan 59:43 You have asthma?

Tristan Harris 59:44 I, I think I had an allergy come in a bit.

Joe Rogan 59:45 Oh. (laughs)

Tristan Harris 59:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 59:46 I was like, I thought that was like-

Tristan Harris 59:47 Making some noises.

Joe Rogan 59:48 Sorry. Um, what's terrifying is that we're talking about from 2012 to 2020, um, YouTube implementing this program, and then what is th- even the birth of Facebook? What is that, like 2002 or '03? Like what is-

Tristan Harris 1:00:02 2004.

Joe Rogan 1:00:02 2004. S- wh- this is such a short timeline in having these massive worldwide implications from the use of these things. W- when you look at the future, do you look at this like a runaway train that's headed towards a cliff?

Tristan Harris 1:00:17 Yeah, I mean, I think right now this thing is a Frankenstein that... It, it's not like... Even if Facebook was aware of all these problems, they don't have the staff unless they hired like hundreds of, you know, tens- hundreds of thousands of people definitely, minimum, to try to address all these problems. But the paradox we're in is that the very premise of these services is to rely on automation.Like, it used to be, we had editors and journalists, or at least editors or, you know, people who edited even what went on television, saying, "What is credible? What is true?" Like, you know, you sat here with, you know, with Alex Jones even yesterday and you're trying to check him on everything he's saying, right? You're researching and trying to look that stuff up, you're trying to be doing some more responsible, uh, communication. The, the premise of these systems is that you don't do that. Like the reason venture capitalists find social media so, um, uh, profitable and such a good investment is because we generate the content for free. We are the useful idiots, right?

Joe Rogan 1:01:15 Hmm.

Tristan Harris 1:01:15 Instead of paying a journalist $70,000 a year to write something credible, we can each be convinced to share our political views and we'll do it knowingly for free. Actually, we don't really know that we're the useful idiots, that's the, kind of the point. And then instead of paying an editor $100,000 a year to figure out which of those things is true that we want to promote and give exponential reach to, you have an algorithm that says, "Hey, what do people click on the most? What do people like the most?" And then you realize the quality of the signals that are going into the information environment that we're all sharing is a totally different process. We went from a high quality, gated process that cost a lot of money, to this, um, really crappy process that costs no money, which makes the companies so profitable. And then we fight back for territory, for, for values, when we raise our hands and say, "Hey, there's a thinspiration video problem for teenagers and anorexia. Hey, there's a mass conspiracy sort of echo chamber problem over here. Hey, there's, um, you know, flat earth sort of issues." And again, the- these get into tricky topics because we want to... You know, I, I know we both believe in free speech, and we have this feeling that, um, the solution to bad speech is better, you know, more speech that counters the things that are said. But in a finite attention economy, we don't have the capacity for everyone who gets bad speech to just have a counter response.

Joe Rogan 1:02:34 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:02:34 In fact, what happens right now is that that bad speech rabbit holes into wor- not only I call worse and worse speech, but more extreme versions of that view that confirms it. Because once Facebook knows that that flat earth rabbit hole is good for you at getting your attention back, it wants to give you just more and more of that.

Joe Rogan 1:02:50 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 1:02:50 It doesn't want to say, "Here's 20 people who disagree with that thing."

Joe Rogan 1:02:53 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:02:53 Right? So I think if you were to imagine a, a different system, we would ask, "Who are the thinkers that are most open-minded and synthesis-oriented, where they can actually steel man the other side?" Actually they can do, you know, for this speech, here is the opposite counter argument. They can show that they understand that. And imagine those people get lifted up. But notice that none of those people that you and I know, I mean we're both friends with Eric Weinstein, and, you know, I think he's one of these guys who's really good at sort of offering the steel manning, "Here's the other side of this."

Joe Rogan 1:03:22 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 1:03:22 "Here's the other side of that." But the people who generally do that aren't the ones who get the tens of millions of followers on these surfaces.

Joe Rogan 1:03:29 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:03:29 It's the black and white extreme outrage-oriented thinkers and, and speakers that get rewarded in these attention economy. And so if you look at how, if I zoom way out and say, "How is the entire system behaving?" Just like if I zoom out and say climate, you know, the climate system, like, how is the entire overall system behaving? It's not producing the kind of information environment on which democracy can survive.

Joe Rogan 1:03:51 Jesus. The, the thing that troubles me the most is that I c- clearly see your thinking and I agree with you. Like I don't see any holes in what you're saying.

Tristan Harris 1:03:59 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:04:00 Like I, I don't know how this plays out, but it doesn't look good. And I don't see a solution. It's like if there are 1000 bison running full steam towards a cliff and they don't realize the cliff is there, I don't see how you pull them back.

Tristan Harris 1:04:16 So, I think of it like we're trapped in a body and, um, that's eating itself. So like it's kind of a cannibalism economy because our, our economic growth right now with these tech companies is based on eating our own organs. So we're eating our own mental health organs, we're eating the health of our children, we're eating the... Sorry for being so gnarly about it, but it's, it's a cannibalistic system. In a system that's hurting itself or eating itself or punching itself, if one of the neurons wakes up in the body, it's not enough to change that. It's going to keep punching itself. But if enough of the neurons wake up and say, "This is stupid. Why would we build our system this way?" And the reason I'm so excited about the film is that if you have 40 to 50 million people who now recognize that we're living in this sort of cannibalist system in which the, an economic incentive is to debase the life support systems of your democracy, we can all wake up and say, "That's stupid. Let's do something differently. Let's actually change the system. Let's use different platforms, let's fund different platforms, let's regulate and tame the existing Frankensteins." And I don't mean regulating speech, I mean really thoughtfully, how do we change the incentives?

Joe Rogan 1:05:19 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 1:05:19 So it doesn't go to the same race to the bottom. And we have to all recognize that we're now 10 years into this hypnosis experiment of warping of the mind. And like, you know, as friends with this movement is, it's like how do we snap our fingers and get people to say, "That, that artifi-" There's an inflated level of polarization and hatred right now, that especially going into this election, I think we all need to be much more cautious about what's running in our brains right now.

Joe Rogan 1:05:41 Yeah, I don't think most people are generally aware of what's causing this polarization. I think they think it's the climate of society because the president and because of, uh, Black Lives Matter and the, the George Floyd protests and all this jazz. But I don't think they understand that that's exacerbated f- in a fantastic way by social media and the last 10 years of our addictions to social media and these echo chambers that we all exist in.

Tristan Harris 1:06:09 Yeah. So I want to make sure that we're both clear, and I know you agree with this, that, um, these things were already in society to some degree, right?

Joe Rogan 1:06:19 Yes.

Tristan Harris 1:06:19 So we want to make sure we're not saying social media is blamed for all of it. Absolutely not.

Joe Rogan 1:06:22 No. No.

Tristan Harris 1:06:22 Not, no, no, no. In fact-

Joe Rogan 1:06:24 It's gasoline.

Tristan Harris 1:06:25 It's gasoline, right? Exactly. It's, it's lighter fluid for sparks of polarization.

Joe Rogan 1:06:28 Yes.

Tristan Harris 1:06:29 It's lighter fluid for sparks of, you know-... more paranoid conspiracy thinking.

Joe Rogan 1:06:32 Which is ironically what everybody, uh... It was the opposite of everybody, what everybody hoped the internet was going to be.

Tristan Harris 1:06:38 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:38 Everybody hoped the internet was gonna be this bottomless resource of information where everyone was gonna be educated in a way they had never experienced before in the history of the human race-

Tristan Harris 1:06:47 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:47 ... where you'd have access to all the answers to all your questions. You, you know, Eric Weinstein describes it as the Library of Alexandria in your pocket.

Tristan Harris 1:06:55 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:56 But no.

Tristan Harris 1:06:57 Well, and I wanna be clear so that... I'm not against technology or giving people access. In fact, I think a world where everyone had a smartphone and a Google search box and Wikipedia, and like a search oriented of YouTube so you can look up health issues and how to f- do it yourself fix anything-

Joe Rogan 1:07:10 Sure.

Tristan Harris 1:07:10 ... would be awesome.

Joe Rogan 1:07:11 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 1:07:11 That would be great. I would love that. Just wanna be really clear, because this is not an anti-techonology conversation.

Joe Rogan 1:07:16 No.

Tristan Harris 1:07:16 It's about, again, this business model that depends-

Joe Rogan 1:07:19 Correct.

Tristan Harris 1:07:19 ... on recommending stuff to people, which just to be clear on the polarization front, um, it... So social media's more profitable when it gives you your own Truman Show that affirms your view of reality every time you flick your finger.

Joe Rogan 1:07:30 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:07:31 Like, it, that's gonna be more profitable than every time you flick your finger, I actually show you here's a more complex, nuanced picture that disagrees with that. Here's a different way to see it. That won't be nearly as successful. And the best way for people to test this, we actually recommend even after seeing the film to do this, is, um, open up Facebook on two phones, especially like, uh, you know, two partners or people who have the same friends. So you have the same friends on Facebook. You would think if you scroll your feeds, you'd see the same thing. You have the same people you're following, so why wouldn't you see the same thing? But if you swap phones and you actually scroll through their feed for 10 minutes and you scroll through mine for 10 minutes, you'll find that you'll see completely different information.

Joe Rogan 1:08:10 Hmm.

Tristan Harris 1:08:10 And it won't... It... You'll also notice that it won't feel very compelling. Like, if you asked yourself... My friend Emily just did this with, with her husband after seeing the film. And she literally has the same friends as her husband, and she scrolled through the feed and she's like, "This isn't interesting. I wouldn't come back to this."

Joe Rogan 1:08:24 (laughs)

Tristan Harris 1:08:25 Right? And so we have to, again, realize how subtle and, and, and s- yeah, just how subtle this has been.

Joe Rogan 1:08:30 I wonder what would happen if I scrolled through my feed, because I literally don't use Facebook.

Tristan Harris 1:08:35 What do you use?

Joe Rogan 1:08:35 I don't use it at all.

Tristan Harris 1:08:36 What do you use?

Joe Rogan 1:08:36 I only use Instagram.

Tristan Harris 1:08:37 Use Instagram.

Joe Rogan 1:08:38 I, I s- stopped using Twitter because it's like a bunch of mental patients throwing shit at each other, um, and I, uh, very rarely use it, I should say.

Tristan Harris 1:08:46 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:08:46 Occasionally I'll check some things to see, like, what the climate is, but, uh, of the cl- cultural climate. But I use Instagram and I... Facebook. I used to use Instagram to post to Facebook, but I kinda stopped even doing that, 'cause it just... It just seems gross.

Tristan Harris 1:09:03 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:04 It's just... And it's these people and these verbose arguments about politics and the economy and world events and just...

Tristan Harris 1:09:12 We have to ask ourselves, is, uh, is that medium constructive to solving these problems?

Joe Rogan 1:09:19 No.

Tristan Harris 1:09:19 Like, just not at all. And it's an attention casino, right? The house always wins, and we're... You know, Eric Wein- you might (laughs) might see Eric Weinstein in a thread, you know, battling it out or sort of duking it out with someone and maybe even reaching some convergence on something.

Joe Rogan 1:09:31 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 1:09:31 But it just whizzes by your feed and then it's gone, right?

Joe Rogan 1:09:33 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 1:09:34 And all the effort that we're putting in to make these systems work, but then it's just all gone and it's-

Joe Rogan 1:09:38 What do you do?

Tristan Harris 1:09:40 I mean, I try to very minimally use social media overall. Um, luckily the work is so busy that that's easier. Um, I, I wanna say first that, um, you know, on the addiction fronts of these things, I, you know, myself am very sensitive and a- you know,