Joe Rogan Experience #1736 - Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger

Narrator 0:00 (drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out.

0:04 The Joe Rogan Experience.

Joe Rogan 0:06 Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music plays) Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Why don't you let's in- let's, I, I keep doing these podcasts where I just talk to people, so please introduce yourself and tell people what you do.

Tristan Harris 0:21 (smacks lips) Uh, I am Tristan Harris and, uh, came on this show about a year ago after The Social Dilemma came out. That's probably where most people know me. Um, and, uh, used to be a design ethicist at Google studying how do you ethically influence people's attention and thoughts and behaviors. Uh, and, uh, really enjoyed the conversation last year. The reason that today I'm here with, um, Daniel Schmactenberger who's really, uh, a person I've learned so much from the last few years and why I thought it'd be a good through line, um, is that the issues of social media, which I know we're gonna talk about today, are connected to a number of other issues that are going wrong in society that are all kind of interconnected. And I've learned a tremendous amount from Daniel, and I thought I'd help really clarify some of these, these issues for everyone.

Joe Rogan 1:04 Well, thank you, Daniel. Thanks for coming aboard.

Narrator 1:06 Thanks for having me here.

Joe Rogan 1:07 W- what a daunting task, how to ethically influence people.

Tristan Harris 1:11 Hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:11 And what a

Joe Rogan 1:12 weird thing that this industry that didn't exist 20 years ago has such a... I mean, think about life on Earth.

Tristan Harris 1:20 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 1:20 And then 20 years ago, all of a sudden, this social media thing sort of e- evolves, and now you have to wonder how much of an effect it has on our just day-to-day lives and how to ethically influence people.

Tristan Harris 1:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:36 What does that... what the fuck does that even mean?

Tristan Harris 1:39 (laughs) Well, first of all, I should say-

Joe Rogan 1:40 How does that... how do those thoughts even get, you know... how, how does that get worked out?

Tristan Harris 1:44 Actually, I should first say that there wasn't, at Google, a department that said, "How do we ethically influence people?" I actually sort of, um, as was shown in that... in the film, The Social Dilemma, wrote this presentation worried about how technology was influencing-

Joe Rogan 1:57 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:57 ... people's thoughts, concerns, behaviors, et cetera. And I studied persuasive technology at Stanford, which is a whole discipline and field, the idea that technology can influence people. And it was out of my own personal concern that when that presentation went viral at Google, um, I, uh, kind of worked my way into this position that never existed before, which was, h- how could we create a framework for what it means to ethically influence other people? And a lot of that has to do with asymmetries of power. I mean, when I was a kid, I was a magician. We talked about this before. Um, magic is about an asymmetric relationship. The magician knows something about your mind that you don't know about your own mind. That's what makes the trick work. And actually, across some of these things we're going to talk about today are ways that there is an asymmetric relationship between what technology knows about us and what we don't know about ourselves.

Tristan Harris 2:44 That's-

Joe Rogan 2:44 When, when you were studying at Stanford-

Tristan Harris 2:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 2:47 ... what year was this?

Tristan Harris 2:48 This was, um, 2002 to 2006. I was an undergrad. And then 2006, I got involved with, uh, Professor B.J. Fogden, uh, who, again, actually studied ways that persuasive technology could be used for positive purpose. Like, how do you help people be healthier? How do you help people floss? How do you help people work out more often? Things like that. It could be used in a positive way.

Joe Rogan 3:09 Right.

Tristan Harris 3:09 But I got concerned, uh, because it was all of this increasing arms race to use persuasive tools to harvest and capture people's attention, now known as the race to the bottom of the brainstem, to go down the brainstem into more social validation, more social narcissism, all of that. And that's one of the arms races we see everywhere, which is like in every single thing. If one oil company doesn't drill for that oil well, the other one will. If one, uh, attention company doesn't add the beautification filter, the other one will.

Joe Rogan 3:37 Hmm.

Tristan Harris 3:37 If one company doesn't do narcissism, social validation hacking, and li- and likes and variable rewards, the other one will. And it's true across so many of the other issues that we're facing, whether it's like, if I don't build the drone for everyone, then someone else is gonna build the drone for everyone. If I don't... So that's how I think

Tristan Harris 3:54 these things are connected.

Joe Rogan 3:54 Did you realize it back then? I mean, in 2002 to 2006, we're talking about a completely different world in terms of social media influence.

Tristan Harris 4:00 Totally. It's before the iPhone, actually.

Joe Rogan 4:01 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 4:01 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 4:02 2007, right?

Tristan Harris 4:03 iPhone came out in 2007. We were studying persuasive technology, and I was, as I've said in the past, uh, partners with the co-founder of Instagram in the persuasive technology class. So we were actually studying how would you apply persuasive technology to people before the iPhone even existed. And, um, you know, for... You know, what bothered me is that I think when people think about how do you ethically persuade people, you just get into a whole bunch of ethical copouts. Like, "Well, we're just giving people what they want." You know? Or, "If they don't want this, they'll, they'll use something else." There's these very simple ways that the minds of people in technology, the tech industry, I think defend what they're doing. And what concerned me was that the ethical framework wasn't really there. Not that I had one at the time, by the way. I studied at Google-

Joe Rogan 4:46 Right.

Tristan Harris 4:46 ... for three years to try to develop, like, what does it mean to ethically influence three billion people who are jacked into the system? And this is before Cambridge Analytica, before the Facebook files and Frances Haugen talking about the, you know... We now have the receipts for all these things, so we talked about all these things in The Social Dilemma, but now there's the evidence with Frances Haugen's whistleblowing that, um, you know, Instagram makes, uh, body image issues worse for one in three teenage girls. Uh, I know I'm going fast, but that's the, the broad

Tristan Harris 5:12 strokes.

Joe Rogan 5:13 Do you know the conspiracy theory about her?

Tristan Harris 5:15 (smacks lips) Tell me.

Joe Rogan 5:15 The, the conspiracy theory amongst, uh, the tinfoil hat folk is, uh, first of all, she was, uh... she started a, uh, Twitter account, like, right before she went there and was immediately verified.

Tristan Harris 5:29 Right.

Joe Rogan 5:29 And then instantaneously was on all these major, uh, media outlets, major network television shows, and being interviewed. And p- and she was saying something that a lot of people felt like was a call to authoritarian intervention into social media, that it was government censorship, uh, was the solution and regulation was the solution to dealing with this problem, and that it seemed like she was a sanctioned whistleblower.

Tristan Harris 5:58 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 5:58 Like, they... she was saying all the things that they wanted to hear, and that's why they put her in the position to make, uh, a big loud noise.

Tristan Harris 6:06 What, what did you think about that when it came up? Just curious.

Joe Rogan 6:09 I always have-... you know, when something like that happens, like, "Hmm... Maybe. Maybe." 'Cause you know the government would do that.

Tristan Harris 6:17 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 6:17 Like, most certainly, they would love to have control over social media. They would love to be able to censor things like the Hunter Biden laptop story. They would love to be able to, you know, hide Joe Biden's medical records or, you know, Kamala Harris's, uh, uh, time as a prosecuting attorney. Like, there's a lot of stuff they would like to do.

Tristan Harris 6:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 6:37 Or district attorney, rather. There, there's a lot of stuff they would like to do, uh, with, uh, access to information. I mean, you're seeing it right now in terms of... One of the things that's been fascinating about COVID is, uh, during this pandemic and during this, uh, terrible time of, uh, you know, paranoia

Joe Rogan 6:53 and dealing with this disease, and, and fear and anxiety, you're seeing, uh, this narrative from social media networks that absolutely walk step in step with the government, where if the government wants certain information censored, it's being censored across major social media platforms.

Tristan Harris 7:13 Yep.

Joe Rogan 7:14 That has to be coordinated. There's no way it's not. And there's no way they're incentivized to not have people discuss certain things, because we've said before, uh, you know, it's one of the major, uh, points of, um, the social dilemma is that things that are controversial, whether they're true or not, are the things that are the most clicked on, the most shared, the most... And that's where-

Tristan Harris 7:39 Go viral, yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:40 That's where the money is.

Tristan Harris 7:41 Yep.

Joe Rogan 7:41 So there's got to be some sort of incentive for them to not do what they do with every other subject, whether it's immigration or gun control or abortion or anything. Yet the algorithms favor-

Tristan Harris 7:54 Do they censor on imm- immigration? Or you're saying that as an example if something goes viral?

Joe Rogan 7:57 As an example if something goes viral, yes.

Tristan Harris 7:58 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not the censorship. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 7:59 Right, they don't censor on

Joe Rogan 8:01 immigration.

Tristan Harris 8:01 No.

Joe Rogan 8:01 I mean, the, the, I mean, the border crisis is a great example of that.

Tristan Harris 8:06 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:06 Like the government probably likes us to not see all those Haitian immigrants storming across the border, but my God, those were shared like crazy.

Tristan Harris 8:15 Totally.

Joe Rogan 8:16 You know? So why was COVID information shared? Well, because there was a narrative they could say, "Well, we're... This is dangerous misinformation and we could protect people," even though some of it turned out to actually be accurate-

Tristan Harris 8:28 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:28 ... like the lab leak hypothesis. It's-

Tristan Harris 8:31 Or at least that, at least that it's a hypothesis

Narrator 8:33 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 8:33 ... that should be considered, yeah.

Tristan Harris 8:33 Yeah, yeah. Totally.

Joe Rogan 8:33 It's a hypothesis, it's... Yeah, that, that at least is being considered by virologists.

Tristan Harris 8:37 Right.

Joe Rogan 8:37 But the point is that who the fuck are they to decide what can and can't be discussed? And when they're doing something step in step with the government, I get concerned.

Tristan Harris 8:49 Totally.

Joe Rogan 8:49 So when someone comes along and this person who's a whistleblower says, "Something needs to be done, you know, we're endangering young girls' lives. We're doing this, we're doing that, we need some sort of government infr- intervention." I mean, this is, uh, essentially calling for censorship and calling for government control of social media, which freaks people out.

Tristan Harris 9:08 So,

Tristan Harris 9:09 so she's pretty clear that she's not calling for censorship. But it's... So the reason I asked you was I was curious what... How it came across your radar, 'cause I, I happen to, to know and hear a little bit about this from her. We interviewed her on our, on our podcast. Um, and, um, the story that goes viral about her saying that she's a PSYOP-

Joe Rogan 9:26 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 9:26 ... or that she's a plant, that's an incendiary, inflammatory, controversial story. So when that gets suggested, is it gonna go... Is it just gonna fizzle out or is it gonna go viral?

Joe Rogan 9:37 How ironic.

Tristan Harris 9:37 It's gonna, it's gonna go viral, exactly. And in fact, the... When you kind of realize like everything that... I mean, there's, there's some things that are real conspiracy theories and there's some things that are real PSYOPs and there's, there's... That's a real thing. But there... Notice how many things we think of as PSYOPs, conspiracies, et cetera now, and it's because anything that has that incendiary quality go- goes, goes viral.

Joe Rogan 9:58 Right.

Tristan Harris 9:58 And I happen to know, for example, I think one of the things, the claims in there is that she's funded by this billionaire, Pierre Omidyar. But I happen to know from talking to her that that happened at the very, very end of what she was doing, and it was a tiny grant of like $150,000. For us in the nonprofit world, that's like a tiny amount of money.

Joe Rogan 10:14 Right.

Tristan Harris 10:14 Basically just to support her flight costs. And I happened to also sort of hear from her how like, uh, how much of the media was constructed at the very last minute. Like, she was working this one, um, newspaper, the Wall Street Journal, to do this sort of procedural rollout of, of specific stuff that she thought was concerning. I guess what I'll just say is like what if she's just a good faith person-

Joe Rogan 10:35 Right.

Tristan Harris 10:35 ... who saw that virality was driving people crazy and that it was, it was harmful to teenage girls? And it's true that the, um, the government would see some of that and say, "Hey, we could use that for, for something else. We could use that. She could be a, a tool for us to do something else." But I, I guess what... You know, and in the aim of complexity and nuance and not jumping to conclusions in this sort of thing, um, m- my perception from, from talking to her now extensively, she's a very good faith actor who was concerned that this was gonna drive the world apart.

Joe Rogan 11:05 I should be really clear-

Tristan Harris 11:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:06 ... that this is not my position-

Tristan Harris 11:07 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:07 ... that she's... This is just the conspiracy theory-

Tristan Harris 11:10 Totally.

Joe Rogan 11:10 I, I literally don't have an opinion on her.

Tristan Harris 11:12 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:12 Uh, I do have an opinion on algorithms and I do have an opinion on what it does do to young girls' self-esteem, and I, I, but-

Tristan Harris 11:19 Totally. You have teenage daughters, right? Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:20 Yes. I, I just think... It... And, and young girls are a point of focus b- uh, for... Why they're a point of focus more than young boys, I'm not entirely sure. I guess it has to do with their emotional makeup and, and, uh, there's higher risk of self-harm due to social media. And Jonathan Haidt talked about that in his book, The Coddling of the American Mind. Um, it's, it's very clear that it's very damaging.

Tristan Harris 11:42 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:42 And I... My kids, uh, you know, uh, my 13-year-old does have like interactions with her friends and sh- I do see how they bully each other and talk shit about each other and it's, it's-

Tristan Harris 11:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 11:52 They get so angry and mad at each other. Um, it is a factor, but it's an al- it's an algorithm issue, right?

Tristan Harris 12:00 It... It... There's multiple things here. So the first thing is, um, just to kind of set the stage a little bit, uh, I always use E.O. Wilson, the sociobiologist to... Who, who, uh-... sort of defined what, what the problem statement for

Tristan Harris 12:14 humanity is. He said, "The fundamental problem with humanity is we have Paleolithic emotions and brains," like easy brains that are hackable for magicians. "We have medieval institutions," you know, government that's not really good at seeing the latest tech, whether it was railroads or now social media, or AI, or deep fakes, or whatever's coming next. And then we have godlike technology. So we have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, godlike technology.

Joe Rogan 12:38 Mm.

Tristan Harris 12:39 You combine that fact, that's the fundamental problem statement. How do we wield the power of gods without the love, prudence, and wisdom of gods? Which is actually something that Daniel taught me. And, um, then you add to that the race to the bottom of the brainstem for attention. What is their business model? Just to review the basics, everybody knows this now, but it's, it's engagement, it's like, "How do I get that attention at all costs?"

Joe Rogan 12:57 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 12:58 So, algorithms is one piece of that, meaning, um, when you're on a news feed, like, I don't want to just show you any news. I want to show you the most viral, engaging, like, longest argumentative comment threads news, right? So that's like pointing a trillion dollar market cap AI at your brain, saying, "I'm going to show you the next perfect boogeyman for your nervous system." The thing that's going to make you upset, angry, whether it's masks, vaccines, Francis Haugen, (laughs) whatever the thing is, it will just drive that over and over again, and then repeat that thing. And that's one of the, the tools in the arsenal to get attention, is that the algorithms. Another one is technology making design decisions, like how do we inflate people's sense of, uh, beautification filters? In fact, just recently, since we talked last time, um, I think it's a MIT tech review article showing that, um, they're all com- they're all competing, first of all, to, like, inflate your sense of beauty, so they're doing the, the, I think you did this thing.

Joe Rogan 13:48 The filters.

Tristan Harris 13:49 The filters, right?

Joe Rogan 13:50 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 13:50 People know this stuff, it's very obvious, but they're competing for who can give you a nicer filter, right? And then now, instead of waiting for you to actually add one, TikTok was actually found to actually do like a 2%, like, just bare beautification filter on the no filter mode. Because the thing is once they do that, the other guys have to do it too.

Joe Rogan 14:07 Oh.

Tristan Harris 14:08 So, I just want to name that all of this is taking place in this race to capture human attention, because if I don't do it, the other guy will. And then, it's happening with design decisions, like the beautification filters, and, like, the follow you, and if you follow me, I'll follow you back, and the like button, and check pull to refresh, the dopamine stuff.

Joe Rogan 14:22 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 14:22 That's all design. Then there's the algorithms, which is I'm pointing a, a thing at your brain to figure out w- what... How can I show you an infinite feed that just maximally enrages you? And we should talk about that, because that thing drives polarization, which breaks democracy, but that's a, that's a... We can get into

Tristan Harris 14:37 that.

Joe Rogan 14:37 Oh, Br- Daniel, let's bring you in here. So, how did you guys, uh, meet and how did this, uh, sort of dynamic duo come about? (laughs)

Daniel Schmachtenberger 14:46 Yeah, I was working on studying kind of catastrophic risks writ large. You've had people on the show talking about risks associated with AI and with CRISPR, and genetic engineering, and with climate change, and environmental issues and-

Joe Rogan 14:57 Pull up to the microphone there.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 14:58 And-

Joe Rogan 14:58 There, there you go.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 14:59 ... escalation pathways to war, and all these kinds of things, and so I was-

Tristan Harris 15:03 Basically, how can shit hit the fan?

Joe Rogan 15:04 Right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 15:05 And I think it's a pretty common question of, like, "How long do we have on which of these, and are we doing a good job of tending to them, so that we get to solve the rest of them?" And then for me, it was there were so many of them, what was in common driving them? Are there any kind of, like, societal generator functions of all of the catastrophic risks that we can address with, to make a more, uh, resilient civilization writ large? Tristan was working on the social media issues, and, um, when you had Eric on, he talked about the twin nuclei problem of atomic energy and kind of genetic engineering, and basically saying these are extremely powerful technologies that we don't have the wisdom to steward that power well. Well, in addition to that is all things computation does, right? There's a few other major categories. And computation has the ability to, as, as you mentioned with Facebook, get to billions of people in a very, very short period of time compared to how quickly the railroads expanded or any other type of tech-

Tristan Harris 16:00 Like, how fast can TikTok get to a billion people, a billion users-

Joe Rogan 16:02 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 16:02 ... which they did in, like, a few years versus before that it took software companies like Microsoft even longer than that, and before that it took railroads even longer than that. So the power of this tech is you can compress the timeline, so you're getting, you know, a scale of a billion people's... Uh, you're impacting a billion people in deeper ways much faster, which means that if you're blind to something, if you don't know what you might be doing, the consequences show up faster than you can actually remediate them. It's-

Daniel Schmachtenberger 16:23 When we say exponential tech, we mean a number of things. We mean tech that makes more powerful versions of itself, so I can use computer chips to model how to make better computer chips, and then those better computer chips can recursively do that. We also mean exponential speed of impact, exponential scale of impact, exponentially more capital returns, exponentially, uh, smaller numbers of people capable of achieving a scale of impact. And so when he's mentioning godlike powers and kind of medieval institutions, the speed at which our tech is having influences in the world, and not just first order influences, the obvious stuff, but the second and third order ones. Facebook isn't trying to polarize the population. It's a externality. It's a side effect of the thing they're trying to do, which is to optimize ad revenue. But the speed at which new technologies are having effects on the world and the total amount of consequence is way faster than regulation can keep up with, and regulation-

Tristan Harris 17:13 So, and just by that, and just by that alone, we should be skeptical of any government's ability to regulate something that's moving faster than it, faster than it can appraise of what the hell is even happening in the first place, so we are-

Joe Rogan 17:22 Well, not only

Joe Rogan 17:23 that, you, you need someone who really understands the technology, and you're not going to get that from elected officials. You're going to need someone who's working on it and has a comprehensive understanding of how the stuff works, how it's engineered, w- where it goes. You're... I mean, I'm, I'm skeptical of the government being able to regulate almost everything.

Tristan Harris 17:42 Right. Well, and so there's maybe a few things to say about that. So one is the complexity of all issues. Like climate change is really complex.

Joe Rogan 17:48 Yes.

Tristan Harris 17:49 Like, the way or the nuclear pathways of escalation or the way a satellite or GPS could get knocked out, triggers a nuke somewhere-

Joe Rogan 17:55 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 17:55 That's also really complex. Social media is really complex. CRISPR, you know, bio stuff is complex.

Joe Rogan 18:01 Right.

Tristan Harris 18:01 So in general, like one of the ways to summarize the kind of problem from our friend Zach Stein's kind of, uh, work is that the complexity of humanity's problems is going up like this, but the capacity to meet them is, like, not really meeting it. And then you add in social media and you polarize people and divide them into, like, they don't even know what's true because everyone's got their own personalized version of reality.

Joe Rogan 18:19 Right.

Tristan Harris 18:20 And instead of even trying to try to meet that-... it goes down. And in fact, social media also rewards the most cynical take on anything. So anytime a government institution has ever said something dumb, like when the guy asked Zuckerberg, "Uh, how do you make money?" And he says, "Uh, Senator, we sell ads." That thing (laughs) goes viral.

Joe Rogan 18:37 Right.

Tristan Harris 18:38 And when that goes viral, everybody saw that, and they didn't see the, you know, the five senators who I talked to who actually do really get these things pretty decently. Now, I'm not gonna say like, "Let's just, like, regulate it," but just to notice, right? So the cynical take about every time an institution makes a mistake, that thing goes viral, which means we lose trust in so many things, because, no matter what, what the issue is. Do you wanna-

Daniel Schmachtenberger 18:58 You notice that you were bringing up the conspiracy theory of might the government have a incentive to make a plant like Frances? And so it's plausible, but plausible doesn't automatically mean is. One of the challenges is when someone has a confirmation bias, they hear something that's plausible, and they just assume that it is without doing the due diligence of saying-

Joe Rogan 19:16 Right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 19:16 ... "What would I need to know?" And you do a good job of checking that. We could also say would Facebook have an incentive to say that she's a plant and try to hire a bunch of PRs to do that?

Joe Rogan 19:24 Sure. Sure.

Tristan Harris 19:24 And they were, and they were helping to spread that story, by the way, by the way.

Joe Rogan 19:28 Oh, that makes sense.

Tristan Harris 19:28 I'm not saying they're responsible for it, actually.

Joe Rogan 19:29 I understand. I understand.

Tristan Harris 19:30 I actually think that what happens is organically, again, the cynical take goes viral, and then if you're Russia or China, or you're Facebook in this case-

Joe Rogan 19:37 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 19:37 ... you can be like, "Hmm, that's a really helpful cynical take from my perspective."

Joe Rogan 19:41 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 19:41 In fact, one of the things that Facebook does try to do is turn the social media debate into a censorship or free speech debate because they know (laughs) that divides the, the, the political class-

Joe Rogan 19:51 Hmm.

Tristan Harris 19:51 ... because they know that the right doesn't want censorship, obviously, and so they say... The more they can spin whatever Frances is doing as she's claiming censorship, the more they can divide, um, uh, any, any possibility for actual action. In fact, I'll tell you just a quick story, really quick, is during the three-hour testimony that Frances, uh, gave, if you watch the full three hours, she had both people on the left and the right... And I've been working on this for eight years. I have never seen someone create a bipartisan consensus the way that she did. She actually did, if you watch the, the video. And there was a senator there on the right who typically had been very skeptical of these issues, and the next day, I talked to her, she was gonna meet with that senator. Um, and he later said, "I can't meet with you." Why? Because the story went viral saying that she was a Democratic operative, and he said, "My base will hate me if I meet with you." So the very thing-

Joe Rogan 20:40 Wow.

Tristan Harris 20:40 ... we're talking about, which is the ability to regulate anything-

Joe Rogan 20:43 Wow.

Tristan Harris 20:44 ... is being broken and shattered because the incendiary controversial take on everything goes viral. Now, again, I'm not saying that we're this, like, easy world we should therefore regulate. It's just like-

Joe Rogan 20:52 Right. Right, I understand.

Tristan Harris 20:53 But noticing the mind warp, like part of what-

Joe Rogan 20:55 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 20:55 ... I wanted to do today is, like, how do we reverse engineer this, like, bad trip we've been on for the last 10 years?

Joe Rogan 20:59 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 21:00 Like, it's like a psychedelic trip where we've all fractured into this different reality where the controversial psyop interpretation of everything, the conspiracy-minded interpretation of everything. Again, n- some things are real, some, some of those things have, have, uh, deserve, deserved reason that way, but just to understand how deep the mind warp has been the last 10 years.

Joe Rogan 21:18 Y- it's so funny. You say the right doesn't want censorship. Isn't that a crazy statement? Like, uh, we, like, shifted the polar, you know, the polar-

Tristan Harris 21:29 What do you mean? Say it, say more.

Joe Rogan 21:30 The... It used to be the left didn't want censorship. The ACLU used to defend Nazis.

Tristan Harris 21:35 Right. Right.

Joe Rogan 21:35 I mean, what the fuck has happened? Like, our poles have shifted. Like, north is south and south is north. It's, it's... It just shows you that so much of what ideology is, is tribal. It's like you-

Tristan Harris 21:47 Right.

Joe Rogan 21:47 ... you find a group that agrees to a certain, um, uh, gr- uh, s- a certain pattern of behavior and thought, and you subscribe to that. And now I am a right-wing conservative, I am a left-wing progressive, and then you just follow the playbook, and it makes-

Tristan Harris 22:05 Totally.

Joe Rogan 22:05 ... it so much easier than having your own individual nuanced thoughts on complex and difficult issues like this.

Tristan Harris 22:11 Right.

Joe Rogan 22:11 But the fact that he couldn't talk to her because his base would somehow or another think that she actually is a Democratic operative, and she does work for the government, and is trying... uh, is some sort of an attempt at censorship. And I'm sure not only is Facebook amplifying that, but all of the different Russian troll pages on Facebook are amplifying that-

Tristan Harris 22:32 Totally.

Joe Rogan 22:32 ... which confuses the water.

Tristan Harris 22:33 Totally. Well, also if I'm Russia or China, Facebook is, like, the best weapon I've ever had against the United States.

Joe Rogan 22:38 Yes.

Tristan Harris 22:39 Oh my god. You've got an F-35? I don't need F-35.

Joe Rogan 22:41 Right.

Tristan Harris 22:42 I've got Facebook. I can destroy your entire coherence as a society.

Joe Rogan 22:45 And they have.

Tristan Harris 22:46 And you won't get anything done, and all of your energy will be spent on waste, infighting, and heat.

Joe Rogan 22:51 We talked about this recently, but there's... I'm sure you saw the story. There was 20, top 20 Christian sites on Facebook. 19 of them were-

Tristan Harris 22:59 Yes.

Joe Rogan 22:59 ... run by a Russian troll farm. (laughs)

Tristan Harris 23:01 I'm, I'm glad you actually mentioned that 'cause-

Joe Rogan 23:02 Or excuse me, it was a Eastern European troll farm.

Tristan Harris 23:04 Yeah, the-

Joe Rogan 23:05 Macedonia, I think it was.

Tristan Harris 23:06 To- totally. Uh, 140... This is an important stat actually. I'm glad you brought it up. Um, a hundred and f-... This is as recent as October 2019. A hundred and 40 million Americans per month were reached by essentially troll farms, actively. Um, there's three categories of pages in which they're... So for Christian pages, the top 15 out of 15 Christian pages were all run by troll farms.

Joe Rogan 23:29 (laughs)

Tristan Harris 23:29 So all of the Christians in the country have, were receiving content, and 85%-

Joe Rogan 23:34 Oh.

Tristan Harris 23:34 This is, this is a secondary point. 85% of the, uh, Christians who saw that stuff in their feed, they didn't actually accept an invitation from the, the group or the page to say, "Yes, I want to subscribe to you." Facebook, because they're optimizing for growth, they changed the way that the system works so that if a page invites you, that's enough to, uh, for it to start putting the content in your feed. So there's an example in Frances's work where there was a QAnon person who invited 300,000 people in one day. 300,000 people, and because Facebook's optimizing for growth and engagement, those people didn't have to say, "Yes, I want to join that group." Just by being invited, it started testing, like, we wanna, we wanna-

Joe Rogan 24:15 Oh.

Tristan Harris 24:15 ... optimize for what's... or sorry, puts in your feed.

Joe Rogan 24:17 So... Oh my God.

Tristan Harris 24:17 And if you click on it, it auto adds you to the group.

Joe Rogan 24:19 Oh my God.

Tristan Harris 24:20 Out of the top 15 pages for African Americans, two-thirds of those top 15 pages were run by troll farms.

Joe Rogan 24:27 Holy shit.

Tristan Harris 24:27 Of the top 15 pages for Native Americans, one-third of those pages were run by troll farms. So we're now... We're not living in an authentic reality. Reality, quote, unquote-

Joe Rogan 24:36 If-

Tristan Harris 24:36 ... is getting more virtual.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 24:37 If you read Chinese military doctrine, specifically look at the 36 stratagems. Don't ever attack a superior opponent directly. Turn the enemy against themselves based on their existing fault lines. Population-centric unconventional warfare, right? Like, that's kind of ancient doctrine. It's just Facebook makes that amazingly easy, because it automatically already puts people into tribal groups that whatever the content is in that group is gonna keep getting up-regulated, optimizes for inflammation and tribal identity, and those types of things. And so you don't have to kinetically attack a country to make the country so turned against itself that the polarized population supports a polarized, uh, representative class, which means you get gridlock on everything, which means you can't do effective governance, which means another country that does autocratic governance just wins geopolitically.

Tristan Harris 25:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:27 It seems absolutely insane that they could, through one page, inviting people-

Tristan Harris 25:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:33 ... instantaneously start to distribute all of their information on the, on those people that they invited. That seems-

Tristan Harris 25:38 So you're saying, so why-

Joe Rogan 25:39 That should kind of be illegal.

Tristan Harris 25:39 So why would Facebook even allow that? Like, you, you would think... So if I'm designing Facebook, you would probably say-

Joe Rogan 25:42 Wait, wait, you just said-

Tristan Harris 25:44 Go ahead.

Joe Rogan 25:44 ... the government should regulate social media. (laughs)

Tristan Harris 25:45 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 25:46 It should be illegal is what I said.

Tristan Harris 25:47 It should be illegal. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 25:48 Yeah. Yeah. I, well, this is... I, I don't think the government should regulate, but I do think there should be rules in terms of, like, if you're a regular person that, say, uh, has a specific group of interests, like say you only like, um, motor cars.

Tristan Harris 26:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:07 You, you like vehicles.

Tristan Harris 26:07 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 26:07 You like, you like, uh, hot rods or whatever, and that's what you're interested in. You, you know, you use Facebook when you're off duty at work and you just wanna just check some stuff out, and all of a sudden you get QAnon shit.

Tristan Harris 26:18 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 26:18 Because they invited you into this QAnon group, and you started getting all this information. You start getting radicalized. It, it seems like (sighs) ... And again, I don't know what we should do in terms of regulation. I, I, but I don't think that social media groups should be able to just distribute information to people based on this concept of universal growth.

Tristan Harris 26:42 Yeah. Well, I mean, think about it. If, if we were just designing-

Joe Rogan 26:44 Or unlimited growth.

Tristan Harris 26:45 Yeah. E- exactly. I mean, if, if we were designing Facebook with a feature called Groups, and Groups had a feature called Invitations, and you could invite people-

Joe Rogan 26:52 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 26:52 ... wouldn't you design it so that people have to accept-

Joe Rogan 26:54 Yes.

Tristan Harris 26:54 ... the invitation for the group before it shows up in your feed? Why would Facebook not do it that way?

Joe Rogan 26:59 Right.

Tristan Harris 26:59 Because what happened is, starting in, I think it was like 2018, people stopped posting as much on Facebook. So you and I, and maybe we used to post a lot more in 2016, 2017. If we stop posting as much, "Oh, shit, we can't harvest all that attention from people."

Joe Rogan 27:12 What was the cause?

Tristan Harris 27:12 "You were doing all this labor." What do you mean?

Joe Rogan 27:14 What caused it to slow down?

Tristan Harris 27:15 Oh, just like peop- I mean, people being more skeptical, maybe, of Facebook, or just realizing they don't want to share as much, or just usage burning out, more people moving to Instagram or TikTok or something.

Joe Rogan 27:22 People are getting older as well, right?

Tristan Harris 27:24 People are getting older.

Joe Rogan 27:24 It's like older, older user base.

Tristan Harris 27:26 Totally.

Joe Rogan 27:27 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 27:27 And so, so now if I'm Facebook, I want to find new sources of free unpaid content creators. Where can I tap that pool of content? Oh, I've got this thing called Facebook Groups where people are posting all the time, so I'm gonna start putting that stuff in people's feeds to just... So now I'm fracking for attention, I'm going lower into all these other places-

Joe Rogan 27:47 Hm.

Tristan Harris 27:47 ... to backfill this attention-harvesting, weAreTheProduct machine.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 27:50 And, and how do you know, since there isn't rigorous identity, if a user that says they're a user is really who they are, or if they're-

Joe Rogan 27:56 Right.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 27:56 ... a troll farm, or if pretty soon they're an AI GPT-3 algorithm? And-

Tristan Harris 28:01 You should explain what-

Joe Rogan 28:01 Yeah, please do.

Tristan Harris 28:02 ... AI GPT-3 is.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 28:04 Uh, the ability to generate text-based deepfakes.

Joe Rogan 28:07 Right.

Tristan Harris 28:08 So, so people know what a deepfake is. It's like you see a fake-

Joe Rogan 28:09 Well, there's a whole Reddit thread with people arguing with each other that are all fake. Do you know about that?

Tristan Harris 28:14 No, I don't, actually.

Joe Rogan 28:15 Here, I'm gonna send it to Jamie. It's, uh, Duncan just sent this to me the other day, and I was like,

Joe Rogan 28:19 "What in the fuck?" I could only look at it for a couple moments before I started freaking out. But the idea that, uh, you know, that's f- that's, it's not far off. Like, this, uh, this ability that, uh, deepfake AI has to recreate, es- espe- especially in text.

Tristan Harris 28:36 Yes, exactly. That, that's specifically what GPT-3 is. It's a text model that trains on trillions of parameters and, and basically the entire corpus of the internet. So you're basically ingesting everything everyone has ever said online ever, including stuff in your voice or in my voice. And then you could say, "GPT-3, write me an argument about why social media is great, written by Tristan Harris, (laughs) using his words and phrases," and it'll do that. It'll actually be able to take my style of, of speech, and it'll generate text there. You could also say... You wanna do the vaccine one?

Daniel Schmachtenberger 29:06 Hm. M- The ability to say, uh, make arguments for vaccines or against vaccines, and say, "Only use real data," and then be able to show the financial vested interest of anyone arguing on the other side, and just have it be able to create m- more data than people can parse in any reasonable amount of time.

Tristan Harris 29:25 And create like an academic-looking paper that's 10 pages long saying why the vaccine is not safe, with citing real charts, real graphs, real statistics, and the real vested interests of people who are, say, positively pointing out that the vaccine is safe, who maybe they have some connection to Pfizer or something like that.

Joe Rogan 29:38 Right.

Tristan Harris 29:39 And it'll generate that full 10-page or 20-page document, and it'll take a team of statisticians, you know, a while to decode that thing, and you can flood the internet with that kind of text.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 29:48 And it's already, we already have, through OpenAI and the GPT-3 algorithm, the ability to pass the Turing test in many areas, meaning that you-

Tristan Harris 29:56 We should explain what the Turing test is.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 29:57 Meaning that if you're reading the text, you can't tell that it wasn't produced by a human.

Joe Rogan 30:00 Right. Turing test is the idea that if you... That's how you find out if someone... It's a very good robot. (laughs)

Daniel Schmachtenberger 30:05 So you've already got an AI-

Joe Rogan 30:07 Ex Machina, right?

Daniel Schmachtenberger 30:08 Right.

Joe Rogan 30:08 So this is, this is the, um, Reddit thread. So this is-

Tristan Harris 30:11 So basically-

Joe Rogan 30:12 These are all "Why do human babies cry?" These are all robots. This is all bots arguing with each other.

Tristan Harris 30:19 "This is what happens when you give birth to a human baby."

Joe Rogan 30:22 "Oh, my bad. I thought you were just trying to answer the question. No worries." "No, I'm trying to answer the question of how babies cry."... "YTA," I don't know what that means, a- and you are disgusting. "I can't even fathom the level of toxicity in this post." These are all bots.

Tristan Harris 30:36 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 30:36 "I am disgusted that you are making fun of others. Don't you know that people in this sub are supposed to be empathetic of others' feelings?" I'm sorry, but you're being a cunt. These are all robots.

Tristan Harris 30:47 Yeah. Talking to each other.

Joe Rogan 30:47 This is wild. Because if you just read this and you didn't know, "I don't really care if you disagree with my opinion as long as you don't call me a pedophile. If you were a real man, you would be with a young girl and take care of her, and you would be a sex offender." Like, this is wild shit.

Tristan Harris 31:04 Yeah. It, one of the things people don't know, it actually was just developed over the summer. They announced it at OpenAI, um, just to track since we came and talked about some of these things last time. In August 2020, OpenAI released a video of using this same technology of machines generating stuff to actually write programming code. So, you tell the GPT-3, "I want a asteroid video game." And it's like (computer sound effect) , and it writes all the code, and then it puts a little graphic of a starship thing in the middle, and then there's rocks that are flying.

Joe Rogan 31:33 Whoa.

Tristan Harris 31:33 And you say, "I want the rocks to move faster," and then the rocks move faster through the asteroid game. Only requiring natural language input, but no programming.

Joe Rogan 31:39 Yes.

Tristan Harris 31:39 So, you're just saying it, you're typing in natural text, "I want an asteroid video game that when I move left, it moves left. I want this. I want the asteroids to move faster. Actually make the, the, the starship bigger." And then it just changes, and it does it all for you. Now, it's not perfect, but this is AGI.

Joe Rogan 31:53 Well, this is typing it in.

Tristan Harris 31:54 You're typing.

Joe Rogan 31:54 You're just typing it in text.

Tristan Harris 31:55 That's right.

Joe Rogan 31:55 But also voice to text, so you could just say it.

Tristan Harris 31:58 You combine these things together and you...

Joe Rogan 32:00 "Alexa, make me a Pong game."

Tristan Harris 32:02 Yeah. Exactly. And-

Joe Rogan 32:04 "Alexa, code me the Unreal Engine."

Tristan Harris 32:06 I mean, that's, that one's going to be harder and harder.

Joe Rogan 32:08 Not yet.

Tristan Harris 32:08 Right. But the point is, that's where we're headed, right?

Joe Rogan 32:10 Right.

Tristan Harris 32:10 So, and part of this is, again, we have the power of God. This is actually it right here.

Joe Rogan 32:14 Here it is.

Tristan Harris 32:14 This is the one. So...

Joe Rogan 32:16 "Make the person 100 pixels."

Tristan Harris 32:18 Yep.

Joe Rogan 32:18 And it's doing it all itself.

Tristan Harris 32:19 Yep.

Joe Rogan 32:20 Wow.

Tristan Harris 32:21 And it writes the code in the right-hand side, and...

Joe Rogan 32:23 So, this is, uh, this video that Jamie pulled up on YouTube is OpenAI Codex live demo, and you can see this all happening while this person types in the data, and they're actually explaining it now.

Tristan Harris 32:34 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:34 How, how this is going to work.

Tristan Harris 32:36 Once you see it later. Yeah, move, move, set its position to 500 pixels down and 400 pixels, yeah, from the left, and then it just does that.

Joe Rogan 32:44 Oh my God, look how quick it codes it.

Tristan Harris 32:45 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:47 Wow.

Tristan Harris 32:47 Now make it controllable with the left and right keys, right arrows, right? Boom, and then now you can move it. So, it does it progressively, right? It's adding the code in.

Joe Rogan 32:55 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 32:56 Um...

Joe Rogan 32:56 Wow.

Tristan Harris 32:57 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 32:58 So, this-

Tristan Harris 32:59 And this, this is going to be accessible to more and more people, too. Go ahead. This is an example of a kind of deep point to think about for the state of the world as a whole is, uh, one of the things that exponential tech means is exponentially more powerful-

Joe Rogan 33:11 I hate to tell you this, but get this thing right up in your face. Mm-hmm. There you go.

Tristan Harris 33:14 Exponentially more powerful tech that's also exponentially cheaper.

Joe Rogan 33:18 Right.

Tristan Harris 33:18 Which also means more distributed. And so pretty soon, this level of tech will not only be getting better, but available to everybody.

Joe Rogan 33:25 Yeah, because right now-

Tristan Harris 33:25 So, what happens...

Joe Rogan 33:26 Go ahead.

Tristan Harris 33:26 ... when you have an internet where not only do you have an AI that is curating the Facebook feed for the most sticky stuff, which usually means the most toxic stuff that, and that's an AI that is curating human-made content, but now you have AIs that are creating content that also get to maximize for stickiness. And then you have the relationship between the curation and the creation AIs. Like, how does anyone ever know what is true about anything again?

Joe Rogan 33:48 (sighs) So, AI can create fake stories, and the, the fake stories can be boosted up by these troll farms and-

Tristan Harris 33:57 Which themselves could be run by fake, you know, accounts and fake logic of, say...

Joe Rogan 34:00 Oh, my God. And-

Tristan Harris 34:02 But wait, it goes one step further, is, so that's just distributed AI, right? But we also have drones making... Continuously better drones with continuously better ability to swarm and weaponize them that also becomes easily accessible. We also have CRISPR-making biotech capability, something that you don't have to be a state actor to have, small actors can have. So, there's this question of how do we make it through having decentralized exponential tech, which means decentralized catastrophic capability?

Joe Rogan 34:33 Godlike powers. Decentralized Godlike powers.

Tristan Harris 34:35 Decentralized Godlike powers... Nukes are really...

Joe Rogan 34:37 ... in terms of biology as well as in terms of technology.

Tristan Harris 34:39 That's right. So, social media's an instance of one case.

Joe Rogan 34:41 So, we don't think we should just, like, gloss over the CRISPR thing. For people who don't understand what CRISPR is, CRISPR is a gene-editing tool. I think it's on the second iteration now, or is it on the third?

Tristan Harris 34:50 Something like that.

Joe Rogan 34:50 They're, they're getting better and better at it.

Tristan Harris 34:52 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 34:53 The, the, the idea is eventually it's going to get to the point where it's like a home computer, like where you are going to be able to edit genes.

Tristan Harris 35:02 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:02 So, how, I mean, how do you stop that? Or what do you do about that? And who has, who, who, if you wanted to have any kind of regulation about something like that, what is the regulation? Is the regulation that you have to have some specific level of clearance before you have access to it? And, but if that's the case, then you put it in ch- in control of the government, and then also...

Tristan Harris 35:24 People don't trust the government, yeah.

Joe Rogan 35:25 Bad actors and other governments are going to just distribute it wildly.

Tristan Harris 35:30 And how do you control that someone would, uh, have to have some kind of access to get it if one of the "its" is something that you just need internet access for, like OpenAI or the ability for cyber weapons, right?

Joe Rogan 35:42 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 35:42 Cyber weapons hitting infrastructure targets, it's like now the only way to regulate that is universal surveillance on everyone's use of their home computer.

Joe Rogan 35:51 And we don't want that future.

Tristan Harris 35:52 So, so in general, like...

Joe Rogan 35:53 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 35:54 Um, because this might sound like just a disaster porn, which I want to be really clear that, I mean, I think our goal in coming on... There is a way through this. Yeah, our goal in coming on was to be able to talk about the framing the problem so we know what we're trying to solve.

Joe Rogan 36:05 Right.

Tristan Harris 36:05 We're not trying to say, "Hey, we've just got this social media problem."

Joe Rogan 36:08 Let's frame it really clearly.

Tristan Harris 36:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:09 Let's frame it really clearly.

Tristan Harris 36:09 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 36:09 Okay, you've got your coding problem, and you have this biology problem with, with CRISPR. How do you, how does a civilization navigate this without killing itself?

Tristan Harris 36:19 Well, so I, uh, Daniel's gonna be able to speak to a lot more of this. I just wanted to f- connect it first to social media-

Joe Rogan 36:23 Okay. Sure.

Tristan Harris 36:23 ... so people see the, the through line. So, I actually think that social media is its other kind of ... It doesn't seem as dangerous, right? It just feels like this, this thing where people are sharing cat videos and their opinions and their i- political ideas and sharing links, but it's actually just like this. And in the same way that that dangerous capacity we're now seeing, what that dangerous godlike power was doing of steering three billion people's thoughts, personalized to them, the thing that would most outrage, you know, boogeyman their, their lizard brain and, and their nervous system. That's a godlike power. When you have a godlike power, there's sort of two choices. (laughs) There, there's two attractors with that power. One is, think of it like a bowling alley. You've got one gutter on the left and one gutter on the right. On the left, you've got a dystopia, a centralized control saying like, "Here's how we're gonna control that godlike power." That's like China controlling its internet. That's like Mark Zuckerberg having a total monopoly on what people can and can't say. Like, those are both dystopias. That's centralized power. The other, uh, gutter in the bowling alley is like, take your hand off the steering wh- wheel and let this thing go for everyone. Like, anyone can make anything go viral. Let's add the devious licks, which is by the way, a TikTok challenge for anybody to basically trash their high school bathroom. And it teaches you how to do it, and these videos go viral, and it's just like everyone's trashing-

Joe Rogan 37:35 What is this? What is a devious lick?

Tristan Harris 37:36 I probably shouldn't have gone there. It's a qu- quickly-

Joe Rogan 37:38 Too late.

Tristan Harris 37:39 It's, it's a, um, uh, a high school, uh, teacher told me this. There's b- there's all these horrible things that are going viral at some point. Virality is a godlike power, and devious licks is a challenge that basically, uh, you- you, um, you're challenging your fellow high school-aged, uh, friends a- around the world to, um, trash their high school bathroom. So you like flush a Big Mac with like shit and all this, uh, horrible stuff down the toilet at the same time. They put like pee ... This is awful. They put like pee in the soap dispenser.

Joe Rogan 38:06 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 38:06 They do all this awful stuff, and it just... You're just spreading a disaster meme. You're just teaching people how to create a decentralized catastrophe-

Joe Rogan 38:13 And they do this-

Tristan Harris 38:13 ... instead of a drone hitting something.

Joe Rogan 38:15 ... just for TikTok likes?

Tristan Harris 38:16 Well, they do it because it's getting attention and engagement.

Joe Rogan 38:19 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 38:19 There's another one that's a self-harm challenge for teenage girls.

Joe Rogan 38:21 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 38:21 They're saying basically, um, uh, you know, this is teaching who can, who can do a cutting ... It's like a cutting challenge I think is what it's called.

Joe Rogan 38:28 Mm.

Tristan Harris 38:28 So, the point is that these, these decentralized-

Joe Rogan 38:30 Do we

Joe Rogan 38:31 know where this comes from? Are these things w- from troll farms?

Tristan Harris 38:34 I don't know.

Joe Rogan 38:35 But they could be.

Tristan Harris 38:36 There's a concept-

Joe Rogan 38:36 Because some of them probably are, right?

Tristan Harris 38:37 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 38:38 There's a concept called stochastic terrorism. There's a good article on it on Edge, which basically is the idea, let's say there was a foreign state actor that wanted to mess things up in the US population. Trying to control a specific person to do a specific thing is hard, but trying to get an already kind of disenfranchised group more radicalized that makes it more likely that some of them do some harmful stuff is easy.

Tristan Harris 39:00 Think about, you know, you last texted me, Joe, on January 6th. I think we had a quick text exchange-

Joe Rogan 39:05 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 39:05 ... 'cause-

Joe Rogan 39:05 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 39:05 ... like, I think that's an example of ... I, I don't, I mean, and I'm not gonna claim that everyone ... It's just that, that's an example I think I would say of I can basically go into a group of the Boogaloo Boys or, you know, Stop the Steal groups or something like that, and I can just seed stuff that's like, "Hey, let's get our guns out. Let's do this." And I just, just, just hinting-

Joe Rogan 39:23 Right.

Tristan Harris 39:23 ... at that idea.

Joe Rogan 39:24 Right.

Tristan Harris 39:24 I, I'm not telling one person to go do something. I'm not controlling anyone. I'm just hinting, and there's a wide enough group there that people can take action. So, that's one of the, the other decentralized power tools. But I just wanted to close the thought of on the, on the bowling alley. We've got, um, the bowling alley, one gutter is like let's lock it down with surveillance. Let's lock it down with Mark Zuckerberg controls everything. Let's lock it down with the government tells us what we can and can't do on computers. And the other gutter, which is the decentralized power for everyone, which without people having the wisdom to wield that godlike power.

Joe Rogan 39:54 Right.

Tristan Harris 39:54 Or like not, at least not evidenced as in, in people's own usage of it right now.

Joe Rogan 39:58 Also, we've incentivized people to do destructive things-

Tristan Harris 40:01 Also, we've incentivized.

Joe Rogan 40:02 ... just for likes.

Tristan Harris 40:03 Right.

Joe Rogan 40:03 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 40:03 So, in, in certain places there is an incentive to, for those things to happen. It's not just by accident. It's like by design and incentivized.

Joe Rogan 40:09 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 40:09 But the-

Joe Rogan 40:09 Wait, what you just said is super important. It's a population that is getting continuously more radicalized on all sides, that simultaneously has continuously more powerful tools available to them, in a world that's increasingly fragile.

Tristan Harris 40:26 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 40:26 And so if you have an increasingly fragile world, meaning more interconnected global supply chains that have, where a, a collapse somewhere leads to collapse everywhere, more sensitive infrastructure, you know, things like that. If you have an increasingly fragile world, you have more and more radicalized people, and you have those radicalized people having access to more and more powerful tech. That's a just fragility across lots of different dynamics, and this is why the social media thing is so central is, it's a major part of the radicalization process.

Tristan Harris 40:54 It's both a major part of the radicalization process, and is itself an example of the centralized control censorship, which we don't want, and the decentralized viral memes for everyone, which radicalize and enrage people and polarize democracies into not working. The thing is, in those two gutters, the gutters are getting bigger every day, like on each side. You've got more potential for centralized control. You've got China basically doing full control over its internet, you know, doing a bunch of stuff to, to k- top down control, and the other side you have more and more decentralized power in more hands, and that, that gutter's growing. So, the, the question is how do you basically ... We have to bowl a strike down the center of that alley, but it's getting thinner and thinner every day. And the goal is how do we actually sort of, um ... It's almost like a test, right? We are, we are given these godlike powers, but we have to have the wisdom, love and prudence of gods to match that-

Joe Rogan 41:43 You-

Tristan Harris 41:43 ... that set of capacities.

Joe Rogan 41:43 You were just mentioning what China's doing to kind of, uh, regulate its internet. That's gonna be worth speaking about.

Tristan Harris 41:49 Yeah. Have you been following this?

Joe Rogan 41:50 Yeah. That's what terrifies me is that we have to become like China in order to deal with what they're doing. Um, I, I, I, I just, I feel like one step moving in that general direction is a social credit score system.

Tristan Harris 42:04 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:04 And I'm terrified of that.

Tristan Harris 42:05 Right.

Joe Rogan 42:05 And I think that that is where vaccine passports lead to.

Tristan Harris 42:08 Mm-hmm.

Joe Rogan 42:08 I really do, and I, I think this idea that they're slowly working their way into our everyday lives and in this sort of inexorable way, where you have to have some sort of paperwork or some sort of a Q-code or something on your phone, or QR code.

42:23 That s- scares the shit out of me.

Tristan Harris 42:25 Right.

Joe Rogan 42:25 ’Cause that, that’s a se- you’re never gonna get that back.

Tristan Harris 42:28 Right.

Joe Rogan 42:28 Once the government has that kind of power and control, they’re gonna be able to exercise it whenever they want with all sorts of reasons to, to institute it.

Tristan Harris 42:36 I, I’m worried about that too, but I will say also, just to also notice, that, um, everywhere there’s a way in which a, a small move in a direction can be shown to lead to another big boogeyman, and that boogeyman makes us angry, social media is up-regulating the meaning of everything to be its worst possible conclusion. So, like, a small move by the government to do X might be seen as, "This is the first step in this total thing." I’m not saying that they’re not gonna go do that, I’m worried about that too, but to also just notice the way that social media amplifies that d- the degree to which we all get kind of- Right, the thing-

Joe Rogan 43:06 ... reactive and triggered by that.

Tristan Harris 43:07 The thing I think is worth mentioning is what China is doing regarding its internet, because it’s seeing real problems. And we might not like their solution, we might want to implement a solution that has more civil

Tristan Harris 43:19 liberties than we should.

Joe Rogan 43:19 Well, let’s explain what they’re doing.

Tristan Harris 43:21 Yeah, yeah. So, I’ll, I’ll do it quickly. So, um, it’s, it’s almost, it’s quite literally as if Xi, Xi Jinping saw The Social Dilemma, because they’ve, they’ve, in the last two months, rolled out a bunch of sweeping reforms that include things like if you’re under the age of 14 and you use Douyin, which is their version of TikTok, when you swipe the videos, instead of getting, like, the influencer dancing videos and soft pornography, you get science experiments you can do at home, museum exhibits, and patriotism videos.

Joe Rogan 43:51 Wow.

Tristan Harris 43:51 So you’re scrolling and you’re getting stuff that’s educating, ’cause they want their, their kids to grow up and want to be astronauts and scientists.

Joe Rogan 43:57 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 43:57 They don’t want them to grow up and be influencers. Uh, and I’m not, when I say this by the way, I’m not, just to be clear, I’m not praising that model, just noticing-

Joe Rogan 44:03 Right.

Tristan Harris 44:03 ... all the things that they’re doing.

Joe Rogan 44:04 Well, I’ll praise it. (laughs)

Tristan Harris 44:05 (laughs) And I know that-

Joe Rogan 44:06 If you’re gonna influence people, that’s a great way to do it.

Tristan Harris 44:08 They also limit it to, um, three hours, uh, sorry, 40 minutes a day on TikTok.

Joe Rogan 44:13 Mm.

Tristan Harris 44:14 For gaming, um, let me actually do the TikTok example. So they, they do 40 minutes a day for TikTok. They also, when you scroll a few times, they actually do a mandatory five-second delay saying, "Hey, do you want to get up and do something else?" Like, because when people sit there infinitely scroll, even Tim Cook recently said mindless scrolling, which was actually invented by my co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, Aza Raskin, he invented, he was in The Social Dilemma, he’s the one who invented that infinite scroll thing.

Joe Rogan 44:37 Mm.

Tristan Harris 44:38 Um, China said, "Hey, we don’t want people mindlessly scrolling," so after you scroll a few videos, it does a f- a mandatory five-second, like, interlude. They also have opening hours and closing hours. So from 10:00 PM until 6:00 in the morning, if you’re under 14, it’s like, it’s closed, meaning, um, one of the problems with social media for teenagers is if I’m not on at 1:00 in the morning, but all my friends are on and they’re still commenting-

Joe Rogan 45:01 Mm.

Tristan Harris 45:01 ... on my stuff, I feel the social pressure. I’m gonna be ostracized if I don’t participate.

Joe Rogan 45:05 Right, and if your notifications are on-

Tristan Harris 45:06 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 45:06 ... your phone keeps buzzing.

Tristan Harris 45:07 Totally. And even if they’re not on, it’s like, "Oh, but I want to see if they-

Joe Rogan 45:10 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 45:10 ... said something about my thing." And so, um, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, we call a multipolar trap. If I don’t participate, but the other guys are, I’m gonna lose out. And Facebook and these companies, they know that, by the way. Even Netflix said, "Our biggest competitor is sleep." So-

Joe Rogan 45:22 True.

Tristan Harris 45:23 ... one of the, um, because they’re all competing for attention. So when you do this mandatory thing where you say, "We’re gonna close from 10:00 PM to 6:00 in the morning," suddenly everyone, if y- you’re in the same time zone, it’s another important side effect, uh, can’t use it at the same time. So these are some examples. For their military, by the way, when you, if you’re a member of the Chinese, uh, uh, PLA, uh, Army, um, you, you get a locked-down smartphone. It’s like a light phone. It’s like hyper-locked down, you can’t do anything.

Joe Rogan 45:47 Mm.

Tristan Harris 45:47 By contrast, we know that Russia and China go into our, um, uh, veterans' groups on Facebook, and they actually try to sew disinformation, try to radicalize veterans. "Hey, Afghanistan happened, aren't you really pissed? Let me show you 10 videos." Right?

Joe Rogan 45:59 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 45:59 And this is like dosing people with more mental health problems.

Joe Rogan 46:02 Right.

Tristan Harris 46:02 So in, in a bunch of different ways, we see that- Specifically if you want to drive civil war in a meaningful way in the US, take the people who have real tactical capability and radicalize them.

Joe Rogan 46:12 Mm.

Tristan Harris 46:13 And so target those groups in particular, and that’s, like, that’s, it makes sense why their military wants to lock down the ability for external influence.

Joe Rogan 46:21 Of course.

Tristan Harris 46:22 Right.

Joe Rogan 46:22 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 46:22 And so while we’re, you know, spending all this money building physical borders, building walls, or you know, spending $50 billion a year on the passport controls and Department of Homeland Security and the physical, you know, if Russia tries to fly a plane into the United States, we’ve got Patriot missiles to shoot it down, but when they try to fly an information, like precision-guided information bomb, we, instead of responding with Patriot missiles, we respond with, "Here’s a white glove Facebook algorithm that says which ZIP Code or- or Facebook group would you like to target?"

Joe Rogan 46:49 Whoa.

Tristan Harris 46:50 Right? So it changes the asymmetries. Typically, what made us power- what made the US powerful was the geographic, um, bo- you know, we had these huge oceans on both sides. It gives us a unique, you know, place in the world.

Joe Rogan 47:00 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 47:00 When you move to the digital world, it erases that geographic asymmetry of power. So this is a imminent national security threat. This is not- And- ... just like, "Hey, social media’s adding some subtle pollution in the form of mental health," or, "Hey, it’s adding a little bit of polarization, but we can still get things done," it’s an imminent national security threat to our continuity of our model of governance, which we want to keep.

Joe Rogan 47:19 Have you spoken to people in power? Have you spoken to Congresspeople, y- y- about this?

Tristan Harris 47:24 Y- yes, but I’m hoping many more of them watch this, because I think people need to see the full scope. And I really do want to make sure we’re not sounding like just full disaster porn, because we want to get to the point-

Joe Rogan 47:32 Don’t worry about that. Go full disaster porn.

Tristan Harris 47:34 (laughs) Well, it just-

Joe Rogan 47:35 Better that than not.

Tristan Harris 47:36 ... it, it, we, it, it’s not meant to scare people, just to get a- an appraisal of-

Joe Rogan 47:39 Right, but-

Tristan Harris 47:39 ... what is the situation that we’re in.

Joe Rogan 47:40 ... it’s gonna scare, the reality is gonna scare people.

Tristan Harris 47:42 Reality is scary.

Joe Rogan 47:43 It’s, it should scare people, because we- we’re so far behind the eight-ball.

Tristan Harris 47:47 There’s a really important point Tristan

Tristan Harris 47:49 was just at that we actually need to double-click on, which is that democracies are more affected by what’s happening with social media than authoritarian-

Joe Rogan 47:57 Of course.

Tristan Harris 47:58 ... nations are. And for a number of reasons, but do you wanna? Well, and we sort of hinted at it earlier, but when social media’s business model is showing each tribe their boogeyman, their extreme reality, it forces a more polarized political base, which means to get elected, you have to say something that’s going to appeal to a base that’s more divided. And in the Facebook files that Frances Haugen put out, um, they showed that when Facebook changed the way its ranking system worked, uh, in 2018, to something called meaningful social interactions, I won’t go into the details, they talked to political parties in Europe. So here we are, it’s 2018, they do an interview with political parties in Poland, in Hungary, in Taiwan, in India, and f- and these political parties say, "Facebook, we know you changed your ranking system."And Facebook, like, smugly responds, "Yeah, everyone has a conspiracy theory about how we change (laughs) our ranking system," because those stories go viral. And they're like, "No, no, no. We know that you changed how your ranking system works because we used to be able to publish, here's a white paper on our agriculture policy to deal with, like, soil degradation. And now when we publish the white paper, we get crickets. We don't get any response. And we tested it, and the only thing that we get a traffic and attention on is when we say negative things about the other political parties." So and they say, "We know that's bad. We don't want to do that. We don't want to, like, run our campaign that's about saying negative things about the other party. But when you change the algorithm, that's the only thing we can do to get attention." It shows how central the algorithm is to everything else. If I'm Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow or anybody who's a political personality, are they really, um, saying things just for their TV audience? Or are they also appealing to the algorithm because most, more and more of their attention is going to happen downstream in these little clips that get filtered around? So they, they also need to appeal to how the algorithm is rewarding saying negative things about the other party. So what that does is it means you elect a more political, like, representative class that's based on disagreeing with the other side and being divided about the other side, which means that it throws a gear into the rent- a wrench into the gears of democracy and means that democracy stops delivering results in a time where we have more crises. We have more supply chain stuff and inflation and all these other things to respond to, and instead of responding effectively, it's just division all the way down.

Joe Rogan 50:05 But it's been division from the jump, even long before there was social media. So all social media is doing-

Tristan Harris 50:10 Is putting gasoline on it.

Joe Rogan 50:11 Yeah, it's they're taking advantage of a trend that already existed. It's not like, they, but my opponent is reasonable-

Tristan Harris 50:17 Right.

Joe Rogan 50:17 ... but I feel like I'm just a better choice.

Tristan Harris 50:19 Tot-

Joe Rogan 50:19 And you could disagree because he's a great guy, but this is how I feel. No one's doing that.

Tristan Harris 50:23 Totally, totally.

Joe Rogan 50:24 Right?

Tristan Harris 50:24 But again, but notice though in this 2018 example how specific the change was. Those political parties, before 2018, they could get elected in those countries because they hadn't gone that, as partisan maybe as we were yet.

Joe Rogan 50:34 Yes.

Tristan Harris 50:34 They could have gotten elected and getting attention by saying, "Here's a white paper about our agriculture policy." But after 2018, the algorithm has the master say. Everyone has to appeal to the algorithm. If I'm a small business, I have to appeal to the algorithm. If I'm a newspaper, do I just, like, write the articles I want to write or the investigative stories, the fourth estate that we need for democracy to work? No, I have to write the clickbait title that's going to get attention. So I have to exaggerate and say, "Joe, Joe Rogan just takes horse dewormer," because that's going to get more attention than saying he took ivermectin. So-

Joe Rogan 51:01 Particularly in this world where no one's buying paper anymore.

Tristan Harris 51:05 Correct, which-

Joe Rogan 51:05 Everyone's buying everything clicking online. So you really... And very few people are even subscribing, so you have to give them these articles and then have these ads in the articles.

Tristan Harris 51:14 And those publishers... And that's also driven by the business models of these, these central

Tristan Harris 51:19 tech companies-

Joe Rogan 51:20 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 51:20 ... especially Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 51:21 There's two feedback loops that he just mentioned. Politically, if you have Facebook and other platforms like this polarizing the population, then the population supports a more polarized representative class, but the representatives to be elected are doing political ads and so the political ads then further polarize the population. And so now you have this feedback loop and then the same is also true with, with media. The media has to, meaning newspapers, television, still has to do well on the Facebook algorithm because more and more there's a monopoly of attention happening there and it's someone seeing a clip there that has them decide to subscribe to that paper or keep subscribing to it or whatever it is. So you end up having the algorithm radicalizing what people want to pay attention to where then the, uh, sources of broadcast have to appeal to that which then in turn further radicalizes the population. So these are runaway feedback loops.

Joe Rogan 52:17 And what's the solution?

Tristan Harris 52:22 Um, well, actually, you, you asked me this last time, and I dodged the question.

Joe Rogan 52:25 (laughs)

Tristan Harris 52:25 And part of it is because, um, it's, it's connected to a set of broader issues that, that I think is actually really deep in Daniel's language is actually the reason I wanted us, uh, to do this together this time. Um, there's obviously many steps to this, right? So once you've kind of let this cancer sort of spread, if you take out the, the thing that was causing the cancer, we, we've now already pre-polarized everyone's beliefs. Like when you say, "What's the solution to all this?" Like all of our minds are running malware, like we're all running bad code, we're all running confirmation bias.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 52:58 Except no one thinks that they are-

Joe Rogan 53:00 Right.

Tristan Harris 53:00 Everyone thinks the other ones are, but-

Joe Rogan 53:01 Right.

Tristan Harris 53:02 ... not, not me. But the point is that all of us, like it doesn't matter, like people on all sides of the political aisles and all tribes, we've all been shown our version of the boogeyman, our version of the inflated thing that got our attention and then made us focus on that and then make us double down and, and go into those habits of those topics being the most important. And so we have to realize that. I almost think we need a shared moment for that. I wish The Social Dilemma was a little bit more of a... It was a shared moment, but I think there's almost like a truth and reconciliation, like, uh, moment that we need to unwind the, you know, our minds from the cult factory, because it's a cult factory that found each of the little tribes and then just sucked them in together and made them in a self-reinforcing chamber.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 53:42 So let's, let's say we take any issue that some people care about and think is central, whether we take social justice or climate change or US China relations. If half of the population thinks that whatever half- half the population has a solution they want to implement, carbon taxes or whatever, other half of the population is polarized to think that that is bad and terrible and going to mess everything up. So that other half are still political actors and they're going to escalate how they counter that. How do you get enough cooperation to get anything done, especially where there are real issues and not just have all the energy become waste heat? In an autocracy, let's take China as an example where you don't have to, where you don't have so much internal dissent, you don't have that issue so you can actually do long term planning. Um, so one of the things that we see is we have decreasing ability to make shared sense of the world. And in any kind of democratic society if you can't make shared sense of the world, you can't act effectively on issues. But the tech, the types of tech that are decreasing our ability to make shared sense of the world are also increasing the speed at which tech is changing the world-... and the total consequentiality of it. And it- that's one way to start to think about, like, this bowling alley example is, we're having faster and faster, more and more profound consequential effects, and less and less ability to make sense of it or do anything about it. So underneath the AI issue, the CRISPR issue, the US China issue, the how do we regulate markets issue, the how do we fix the financial crisis issue, is-

Joe Rogan 55:12 Quality.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 55:12 ... can we make sense of anything, collectively, adequately, to be able to make choices effectively in the, in the environment we're in? And that's underlying it. Tristan was laying out that you got these two gutters, right? You've got decentralized catastrophe weapons for everyone if we don't try to regulate the tech in some ways, and that world breaks. Or to say, if we don't want decentralized catastrophe weapons for everyone, maybe we do something like the China model, but where you have ubiquitous surveillance, and that's a dystopia of some kind. And so either you centralize the power and you get dystopias, or it's decentralized and you get catastrophes. And right now, the future looks like one of those two attractor states most likely, catastrophes or dystopias. We want a third attractor. How do you have a world that has exponential tech that doesn't go catastrophic, where the control mechanisms to keep it from going catastrophic aren't dystopic?

Tristan Harris 56:04 And by the way, we're not here saying like, "Go buy our thing," or, "We've got a new platform." This is not about... This is just about describing what is that, that center of that bowling alley that's not the gutters-

Joe Rogan 56:14 Got it.

Tristan Harris 56:14 ... that we can skate down? The closest manifesting example of this so far, um, although we need to do one more construction, I think, which is this, um, but is, is Taiwan, because Taiwan, actually I think I talked about it last time we were, we were here, is a, um, uh... They've got this digital minister, Audrey Tang, who has been, um, saying, "How do you take a democracy and then use technology to make a stronger democracy?" So you can look right now at the, the landscape. You say, "Okay, we can notice that China and countries like China, autocratic countries, are employing the full suite of tech to make a stronger authoritarian autocratic society." They're adding surveillance. They're doing, you know, cameras everywhere. They're doing Sesame credit scores. They're, uh, using TikTok to educate their people instead of turn them into influencers. They're using the full suite of tech to create their kind of autocracy that they want to see. By contrast, open societies, democracies, western democracies, are not consciously saying, "Hey, how do we take all of this tech and make a stronger democracy?"

Joe Rogan 57:17 Right.

Tristan Harris 57:17 "How do we have tech plus democracy equals stronger democracy?" One of the other reasons I wanted to talk to you is, so far, I think the tech reform conversation is like, how do we make social media like 20% less toxic and then call it a day? Or like take a mallet and break it up and then call it a day. That's not enough when you understand the full situation assessment that we're kind of laying out here of the skating down the middle of the bowling alley. The, the thing that we need that competes with that thing, because we can't just also allow... That thing's going to outperform to the, the China autocratic model is going to out-compete a, you know, democracy plus social media (laughs) that like is 20% less toxic, isn't going to out-compete that thing.

Joe Rogan 57:53 Well, ultimately, in the long run, it's going to, but the, the, that's fascinating is they're willing to forego any sort of profits that they would have from these children from 10:00 PM to 6:00 AM-

Tristan Harris 58:03 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:03 ... in order to make a more potent society of more influentia- not influencer, but influential, more educated, more positive people that are going to contribute to society.

Tristan Harris 58:14 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 58:14 This is something that I think you can only do if you have this inexorable connection between the government and business. And that's something that they have with corporations and with the CCP over there.

Tristan Harris 58:24 Right.

Joe Rogan 58:25 They have this ability because they're, they're completely connected, like the-

Tristan Harris 58:30 Well, what did the senator tell us about China's response? Oh, yeah. This is, uh, a great point. We, we were talking with a, a sitting senator who was saying... or at some national security conference, um, talking to a foreign minister of a major EU country and said, "Who do you think, um, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, considers to be the greatest rival to its power?" You would say United States, right?

Joe Rogan 58:53 Right.

Tristan Harris 58:54 Said, "It's not the United States." They consider their own technology companies to be the greatest threat to their power.

Joe Rogan 59:01 Oh, so that's why when someone like Jack Ma steps out of the line, they lock him up in the brig for a few months and shut his mouth.

Tristan Harris 59:07 Notice that-

Joe Rogan 59:07 That's... Ah.

Tristan Harris 59:07 ... you know, cryptocurrency... Oh, that's a threat to-

Joe Rogan 59:10 Of course.

Tristan Harris 59:10 ... our financial system. Oh, and Bitcoin specifically. Um, oh, TikTok, that's a threat to the mental health of our kids.

Joe Rogan 59:16 Mm.

Tristan Harris 59:16 Oh, Facebook, we don't want that in our country. That would open up our military to foreign hacking.

Joe Rogan 59:20 Ah.

Tristan Harris 59:20 So they see correctly that technology is the new source of power of basically what guides societies. It is the, it is the pen that is writing human history, and it doesn't have... If you let just for-profit motives, again, coupled with like, how do I get as much attention out of people as possible in the race to the bottom of the brainstem to suck it out of people, that thing doesn't work with societies. That breaks it.

Joe Rogan 59:41 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 59:41 So they see that appropriately and then say, "Let's do something about it." Now the cynical view is obviously they're a communist country that's just, you know, just doing their thing. That's a cynical perspective. But a post-cynical perspective is they're also appropriately recognizing that there's a certain threat that comes with allowing unregulated technology.

Daniel Schmachtenberger 59:58 So, one way to think about this, Tristan was just saying that they recognize the power of new technologies and the need to be able to employ them if they want to be effective. Um, we can see how much the world responded, how much the US responded to the possibility of a nuclear bomb with the Manhattan Project, just even the possibility that the Germans would get it and how that would change everything asymmetrically, and so we make basically a indefinite black budget, find all the smartest scientists in the world, because that much asymmetry of tech will determine who runs the world. It's important to also say there are some people who will have just like a knee-jerk reaction that says, "Oh, you guys are just being catastrophic." There have-

Tristan Harris 1:00:39 "Yeah, you guys are just trying to scare us. Disaster porn."

Daniel Schmachtenberger 1:00:41 "There have always been these risks. We always come through them." Really, until World War II and the bomb, there was no way for us to actually mess up the habitability of the world writ large. We could mess up little local things, and in fact, that happened. Most previous civilizations did go, like...

Joe Rogan 1:00:55 ... did go extinct for different reasons. But World War II was the first time we had truly globally catastrophic tech, and we had to build an entire world system, mutually assured destruction, the Bretton Woods world, the IGO world to basically-

Tristan Harris 1:01:08 United Nations.

Joe Rogan 1:01:08 ... not use that tech. Well, now, that was basically the first catastrophe weapon, and then we had only two superpowers that had it, so you could do mutually assured destruction, and it's really hard to, to enrich uranium and make nukes. It's not hard to do these types of tech, right? That's the whole point. And we have now dozens of catastrophe weapons, many dozens of actors, including non-state actors who have them. And so we're like, "Oh, we're in a truly new phase. This isn't the same as it's always been. We're in a novel time of risk." And exponential technologies with kind of computation at the center, AI and these other ones we're talking about, are so much more powerful than all forms of legacy power, that only the groups that are developing and deploying exponential tech will influence the future. That's, like, the big story. And then we would say, "Well, which groups are developing and deploying exponential tech?" Well, China is, autocratic nations are. Facebook is, Google is, like, major corporations that are also top-down, non-democratic systems are, and they're becoming... Like, Facebook has three billion people. The US has 300 million people, right? We're talking about something that has a global scale of influence, but is really a top-down system.

Tristan Harris 1:02:16 A corporation though, so you either have corporations that are wielding the power of all this technology for mass behavior modification, surveillance of everyone, perfect sort of understanding of their psychological traits and then moving in that scale, but in the corp- in the tech, big tech, tech corporation model, they're doing it for a for-profit motive. Whereas in the CCP model, they're doing it for their ideological goals.

Joe Rogan 1:02:36 But neither of them are democratic, neither of them have some kind of participatory governance, jurisprudence of, for, and by the people. And the open societies are not innovating in how do we develop and deploy exponential tech in an open society way. And that's fundamentally what we're saying has to be, like, the central imperative of the world right now, is you're not going to be able to compete with groups that are developing and deploying exponential tech if you are not also. But how do we do that in a way that preserves the civil liberties that we care about, actually advances them, and can advance participatory governance and collective intelligence? And that's not even-

Tristan Harris 1:03:12 Well, the simple way is you don't, right? The simple way is you lock things down-

Joe Rogan 1:03:16 Simple way is you beat China.

Tristan Harris 1:03:16 ... you become an autocratic... Yeah. Right. So, you either beat China by becoming China, or you figure out a third way.

Joe Rogan 1:03:22 Well, that's what-

Tristan Harris 1:03:22 And you would like to see there be a third way.

Joe Rogan 1:03:24 I'd like to see a third way, way too, but I don't see it.

Tristan Harris 1:03:27 So there-

Joe Rogan 1:03:28 That's what's terrifying to me. So, like, I, I, and I feel like-

Tristan Harris 1:03:30 A little more about Taiwan is actually worthwhile.

Joe Rogan 1:03:31 ... we're moving in the direction of China more than we're moving in the direction of some new utopia. Currently, yes.

Tristan Harris 1:03:39 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:03:39 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:03:40 So, what about Taiwan? Well, so-

Joe Rogan 1:03:41 You can't even mention that.

Tristan Harris 1:03:43 (laughs)

Joe Rogan 1:03:43 See what happened with John Cena?

Tristan Harris 1:03:44 No, what happened?

Joe Rogan 1:03:45 You didn't see that?

Tristan Harris 1:03:46 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:03:47 John Cena was a... Uh, there was an opening weekend for Fast and the Furious 9, I believe, and John Cena accidentally or inadvertently, uh, said that Taiwan is going to be the first country that sees the movie. Well, China doesn't recognize Taiwan as a country.

Tristan Harris 1:04:05 Is a country.

Joe Rogan 1:04:05 And if you want to do business with Ch- China, you can't say that. Um, that was on full display when, uh, and it made people very skeptical of the World Health Organization when one of their, uh, spokespeople was having a conversation with a journalist and, uh, when she brought up Taiwan's response, and other countries have done it like this, but Taiwan's response, and he disconnected his line.

Tristan Harris 1:04:24 Oh, I did see that.

Joe Rogan 1:04:25 Did you see that?

Tristan Harris 1:04:25 Yes.

Joe Rogan 1:04:25 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 1:04:25 Yeah, yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:04:25 And then came back on and glossed over very quickly, said, "China's done a wonderful job. Let's move on." And she was like, "But Taiwan..." And he's like, "China is amazing," and China this and China that. Well, John Cena, by saying that Taiwan was the first country that was going to see Fast and the Furious pissed off China, and then John Cena made a video where he spoke Mandarin. And in it, it's like this weird video. You should watch it because you haven't seen it. Let's show it to them, show it to them, because it's, he's apologizing to China in the weirdest way, saying, "I really, really respect China, and I'm so sorry, and I made a mistake. I was very, very tired."

Tristan Harris 1:05:02 So, so this is the perfect example of a kind of dystopia-

Joe Rogan 1:05:05 Yes.

Tristan Harris 1:05:05 ... that we don't want to go to a future where people are all accommodating or can't feel or think their actual thoughts because they have to appeal to some source of power.

Joe Rogan 1:05:14 Exactly.

Tristan Harris 1:05:15 Right?

Joe Rogan 1:05:15 And the source of power is financial because $160 million was the opening weekend for Fast & Furious 9, and $134 million of it came from China.

Narrator 1:05:23 Chinese )

Joe Rogan 1:05:23 Saying, "I had many, many interviews, and in one of them, I made a mistake. Everyone asked me if I can use Chinese. People at Fast and Furious 9 gave me lots of interview information. I made a mistake. I have to say right now, it's so, so, so, so, so, so important. I love and respect China and Chinese people. I'm so, so sorry for my mistake. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm very sorry. You have to understand, I... I love and respect China and Chinese people. I'm sorry." That's it.

Tristan Harris 1:06:29 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:29 He doesn't even say what he's sorry about.

Tristan Harris 1:06:31 Right, because he keeps saying that-

Joe Rogan 1:06:31 And this is wild shit.

Tristan Harris 1:06:33 Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:06:33 When you see this guy who is, you know, one of our big major action movie stars-

Tristan Harris 1:06:39 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:40 ... just on his knees apologizing to China.

Tristan Harris 1:06:43 Right.

Joe Rogan 1:06:44 Who hadn't said anything bad about China.

Tristan Harris 1:06:46 Not at all.

Joe Rogan 1:06:47 Right. He's great. All he did was say Taiwan is a country, which you can't say.

Tristan Harris 1:06:50 Right. And if someone talks about something that's not the mainstream narrative in the tech companies currently, there'd be-

Joe Rogan 1:06:56 Can't believe you never saw that.

Tristan Harris 1:06:58 I, I think I...... I, I'd seen it in, like, a John Oliver video or something briefly.

Joe Rogan 1:07:01 Oh, okay.

Tristan Harris 1:07:01 So I, I'd had taste of it, but yeah. No, that's a good example-

Joe Rogan 1:07:03 That's hilarious. That's, that's where you get your news? (laughs)

Tristan Harris 1:07:05 (laughs) I don't know, but I was working out sometime. Um, I ... So this is a good example of we don't want to live in dystopias where our thought and our ideas and our free expression and our ability to figure out what's true in an open-ended way, because we don't know what's true.

Joe Rogan 1:07:20 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:07:21 Um, we need to protect that. But we also ... Remember the last time I ended our conversation talking about Orwellian dystopias and Huxleyan dystopias-

Joe Rogan 1:07:27 Yes.

Tristan Harris 1:07:28 ... that quote about amusing ourselves to death? Orwell feared, feared a world where we would ban books and censor information. Huxley feared a world where we'd be drowned in tr- in irrelevance and distraction.

Joe Rogan 1:07:37 Mm.

Tristan Harris 1:07:38 Right? So tho- that's kind of the, another version of the two gutters. Like we, we-

Joe Rogan 1:07:41 Yes.

Tristan Harris 1:07:41 ... right now we're kind of getting a little bit of both, right? We're getting a little bit of, "Hey, we don't like the way that the companies are doing this sort of censorship or platforming, deplatforming of people." We also don't want the unregulated, like, virality machines where the craziest stuff and the most controversial stuff that confirms our biases goes viral, because both those things break, break society.

Joe Rogan 1:08:02 Right. So let's get back to that again. What's the solution?

Tristan Harris 1:08:05 Well, as an ex- Let me just make one narrow solution for that one-

Joe Rogan 1:08:07 Okay.

Tristan Harris 1:08:07 ... because, uh, it's funny because Frances in her own testimony says Facebook wants you to believe in false choices between free speech and censorship. There is a solution that Facebook themselves knows about for this particular problem, which is actually just to remove the reshare button. The, the, basically the retweet button, the reshare button. Um, what they found in their own research ... Facebook spent something like multi- like a billion dollars or something, multibillion dollars on integrity, mode- content moderation, all that stuff, and they said in their own research it would be more effective to, um ... than, than the billions of dollars they spent on, on f- content moderation, to just the re- remove the reshare button after you, after people click it twice. So in other words, the s- you can hit reshare on a thing and it goes to all your friends.

Joe Rogan 1:08:50 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 1:08:50 And then all those friends, they still see a reshare button, and they can click reshare and then it goes to all their friends.

Joe Rogan 1:08:56 Right.

Tristan Harris 1:08:56 After that, there's no reshare button. If you just remove the instant, frictionless, like, make my nervous system twitch and then I, boom, I'm resharing it to everybody, if you just remove that one thing, you keep freedom of speech, but you kill an irresponsible reach, just like instant reach for everyone, right?

Joe Rogan 1:09:13 But you also killed the ability to retweet something or reshare something that's interesting.

Tristan Harris 1:09:18 You could, you could still copy and paste a thing and share it.

Joe Rogan 1:09:20 You can?

Tristan Harris 1:09:20 You can still do that. Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Rogan 1:09:22 Okay.

Tristan Harris 1:09:22 But I think that we have to ask ... There's a story about Steve Jobs that I've referenced this several times. Someone, um ... You'd appreciate this because it's about podcasts. Someone showed him, um, the latest version of the podcast app that someone wanted to make on the, on the iPhone. This is on the iPhone early days. And they're like, "What if we made it so in the podcast app we had a reshare button and you could see a feed of all the stuff that your friends were, were looking at?"

Joe Rogan 1:09:44 Yeah.

Tristan Harris 1:09:44 I mean, it sounds like kind of a ... It's just like social media, and it would be really engaging and people-

Joe Rogan 1:09:48 Mm-hmm.

Tristan Harris 1:09:48 ... would get sucked into podcasts and da, da, da. But Steve Jobs' response was, "No." If something is truly that important and truly that meaningful, someone will copy and paste it as a link and be like, "You got to check out this interview with Joe Rogan," which I hope people do with this episode, because it's crossing a threshold of significance of what is truly worth our undivided attention, which is also the name of our, our podcast. We call