Joe Rogan Experience #1558 - Tristan Harris

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

Good. Good to be here.

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

Yeah.

And they're bonkers. So what, say that real quick.

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

I think-

Or, or course, or filmed throughout the month of September.

... it was a really well done documentary. But I think it's one of those documentaries that affirmed a lot of people's worst suspicions about the dangers of social media, and then on top of that, it sort of a-alerted them to what they were already experiencing in their own personal life and, like, highlighted it.

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, most people were aware. I think it's a thing everyone's been feeling that the feeling you have when you use social media isn't that this thing is just a tool or it's on my side, it is an environment based on manipulation, as we say in the film. And that's really what's changed, that, you know, w- (sighs) I, I remember, you know, I was gonna be working on these issues for something like eight or, eight years or something now.

Could you please tell people who didn't see the documentary-

What it is, yeah.

... what, what your background is-

Yeah.

... and what you, how you got into it?

Yeah, so I, uh, the, you know, the, the film goes back as a, a set of technology insiders. My, my background was as a design ethicist at Google. So I first had a startup company, uh, that we sold to Google, and I landed there through a talent acquisition. And then, um, uh, started, uh, work, about a year into being at Google, uh, made a presentation that was about how essentially technology was holding the human collective psyche in its hands, that we were really controlling the world's psychology. Uh, because every single time people look at their phone, they are basically experiencing thoughts and scrolling through feeds and believing things about the world, this has become the primary meaning-making machine for the world. And that we as Google had a moral responsibility to, uh, you know, hold the collective psyche in a thoughtful, ethical way and not create this sort of race to the bottom of the brain stem attention economy that we now have. Uh, so my background was as a, as a kid I was a magician. We can get into that. Uh, I, uh, studied at a lab at Stanford, uh, called, or studied in a class called the Stanford Persuasive Technology, uh, Class that taught a lot of the engineers at, in Silicon Valley kind of how the mind works, and the co-founders of Instagram were there. And, uh, then later studied behavioral economics and how the mind is sort of influenced. I went into cults and started studying how cults work, and then arrived at Google through this lens of, you know, technology isn't really just this thing that's in our hands. It's more like this manipulative environment that is tapping into our weaknesses, everything from the slot machine rewards to, you know, the way you get tagged in a photo and it sort of manipulates your social validation and approval, these kinds of things.