Joe Rogan Experience #1736 — Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger Transcript

Transcript

0:00 The Joe Rogan Experience. And I really enjoyed the conversation last year. The reason that today I'm here with Daniel Schmachtenberger, who's really a person I've learned so much from the last few years and why I thought it'd be a good through And what a weird thing that this industry that didn't exist 20 years ago has such a, how do we ethically influence people?

2:23 I mean, when I was a kid, I was a magician. But I got concerned because it was all of this increasing arms race to use persuasive tools for everyone, then someone else is going to build the drone for everyone. So that's how I think. And, 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 cop outs, like, well, we're just giving people what they want, you know, or if they don't want this, they'll, they 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 for three

5:15 Tell me. She was saying all the things that they wanted to hear, and that's why they put her in the information. I mean, you're seeing it right now in terms of one of the things that's There's no way it's not. The algorithm favors. Right. It's a hypothesis that at least is being considered by virologists. But the point is that So she's pretty clear that she's not calling for censorship. But the reason I asked you,

9:43 I mean there's some things that are real conspiracy theories and there's some things that are real psyops and that's a real a tiny grant of like $150,000 for us in the nonprofit world. That's like a tiny amount of good faith actor who was concerned that this was going to drive the world apart. Yes. And they get so angry and mad at each other. We have medieval institutions, you know, government that's not really good

12:40 that's the fundamental problem statement. It's like, how do I get that attention at all costs? Another one is technology making design decisions. Right. the dopamine stuff. Pull up to the microphone there. we can address with to make a more resilient civilization writ large. Tristan was working on the social media issues. companies like Microsoft even longer than that.

16:35 speed of impact, exponential scale of impact, exponentially more capital returns, exponentially And regulation- of how this stuff works, how it's engineered, where it goes. but the capacity to meet them is like not really meeting it. And then you add in social media and And they didn't see that, you know, the five senators who I talked to who actually do really get these things pretty decently. And I'm not going to say like, let's just like regulate

19:17 a good job of checking that. We could also say, would Facebook have an incentive to say that And so they say, the more they can spin whatever Frances is doing as she's claiming censorship, Why? this different reality where the controversial psyop interpretation of everything, the conspiracy-minded interpretation of everything. It used to be the left didn't want censorship.

22:02 And then you just follow the playbook. And it makes it so much easier than having your own individual nuanced thoughts on complex Facebook is like the best weapon I've ever had against the United States. I'm glad you actually mentioned that. There's three categories of pages in which they're... they changed the way the system works so that if a page invites you, that's enough for it to start

24:27 Of the top 15 pages for Native Americans, one-third of those pages were run by troll farms. instantaneously start to distribute all of their information on those people that they invited. But I do think there should be rules in terms of like if you're a regular person that, say, has a specific group of interests. because they invited you into this QAnon group,

26:42 Well, I mean, think about it. What caused it to slow down? So I'm going to start putting that stuff in people's feeds to just – a couple moments before I started freaking out, but the idea that written by Tristan Harris, using his words and phrases. citing real charts, real graphs, real statistics, and the real vested interests of people who are, to pass the Turing test in many areas.

30:09 Reddit thread. So this is No worries. are supposed to be empathetic of others' feelings? and take care of her, and you would be a sex offender. of using the same technology of machines generating stuff and then the rocks move faster through the asteroid game. You're just typing it in text. Not yet. Yep. Oh my God, look how quick it codes it. Wow. distributed. And so pretty soon this level of tech will not only be getting better but available to everybody.

34:02 But wait, it goes one step further. That's right. like where you are going to be able to edit genes. And how do you control that someone would 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 open AI or the ability for cyber weapons, right? Yeah, our goal in coming on was to be able to talk about framing the problem

36:22 I just wanted to connect it first to social media so people see the through line. You've got one gutter on the left and one gutter on the right. On the left, you've got a dystopia, I probably shouldn't have gone there. It's a quickly, it's a, um, uh, high school teacher They put, like, pee in the soap dispenser. They do all this horrible stuff down the toilet at the same time. They put like pee, this is awful. They put like pee in the soap dispenser. They do all this awful stuff. And it just, you're just

38:32 Are these things from troll farms? 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. I'm just hinting, and there's a wide enough group there And the other gutter, which is the decentralized power for everyone, which without people having the wisdom to wield that godlike power or like not at least not evidence in people's own usage of it right now.

40:17 has continuously more powerful tools available to them in a world that's increasingly fragile. centralized control censorship, which we don't want, and the decentralized viral memes for We are given these godlike powers, but we have to have the wisdom, love, and prudence of gods to match that set of capacities. I really do. But I will say also, just to also notice that everywhere there is a way in which a small

43:09 is what China is doing regarding its internet, because it's seeing real problems and we might So you're scrolling and you're getting stuff that's educating because they want their kids They also limit it to three hours, sorry, 40 minutes a day on TikTok. scroll a few videos, it does a mandatory five second like interlude. They also have opening hours and closing hours. So from 10 PM until

45:19 even Netflix said their biggest competitor is sleep. So one of the, because they're all competing happened. Don't you really piss? Let me show you 10 videos. And this is like dosing people with $50 billion a year on the passport controls and the Department of Homeland Security and it erases that geographic asymmetry of power. So this is an imminent national security threat.

47:34 Better that than not. It's not meant to scare people. Just to get an appraisal more polarized political base, which means to get elected, you have to say something that's going to because we used to be able to publish, here's a white paper on our agriculture policy to deal It shows how central the algorithm is to everything else. we have more supply chain stuff and inflation and all these other things to respond to.

50:17 Right. Those political parties that before 2018, they could get elected in those countries because than saying he took ivermectin. Particularly in this world where no one's buying paper anymore. And so now you have this feedback loop. And what's the solution? 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 go into those habits of those topics being the most important.

53:59 Other half of the population is polarized to think that that is bad and terrible and So one of the things that we see is we have decreasing ability to make shared sense of the world. two gutters, right? You've got decentralized catastrophe weapons for everyone if we don't has exponential tech that doesn't go catastrophic where the control mechanisms to keep it from going

56:35 how do you take a democracy and then use technology to make a stronger democracy? they want to see. By contrast, open societies, democracies, Western democracies, are not would have from these children from 10pm to 6am.m. in order to make a more potent society of more influential, Oh, yeah. This is a great point. We were talking with a sitting senator who was saying,

59:01 Oh, so that's why when someone like Jack Ma steps out of the line, Oh, Facebook, we don't want that in our country. let's do something about it. Now, the cynical view is obviously they're a communist country that's just doing their thing. who will have just like a knee-jerk reaction that says, Most previous civilizations did go extinct for different reasons.

1:01:39 computation at the center, AI, and these other ones we're talking about are so much more powerful A corporation though. not going to be able to compete with groups that are developing and deploying exponential tech if I'd like to see a third way too, but I don't see it. So what about Taiwan? Well, China doesn't recognize Taiwan as a country. and when she brought up Taiwan's response

1:04:29 Let's move on. way, saying, I really, really respect China and I'm so sorry. And I made a mistake. I was very, if I can use Chinese. I'm sorry. Right. that's not the mainstream narrative That's where you get your news? little bit of, hey, we don't like the way that the companies are doing this sort of the reshare button. What they foundweet button, the reshare button.

1:08:58 If you just remove the instant frictionless, like make my nervous system twitch and then feed of all the stuff that your friends were looking at. I mean, it sounds like kind of, it's just like social media and it'd be really engaging and people would get Or creating influencer culture or just rewarding, again, the controversy and the conspiracy theory

1:10:51 viral as possible, right? They're like, hey, if we make it have this photo, if we present it this also don't spend a lot of time researching a lot of things that we read It's very difficult to even trust. that is the basis of a hypothesis or a conjecture that then I'll do the scientific method on, These companies are fundamentally different because their externality is a polarized population,

1:13:51 who was going to meet with Francis but then couldn't Yeah. and upregulating the things that get most engagement. This is actually a key point, It's, can the government regulate at the speed that tech can outmaneuver it? And this is before AI. Yeah, before the GPT. the times they make great decisions Like they're just putting out a post You can tell.

1:16:40 a person can trigger a thing that makes it, I was thinking that about Twitter a long time ago. are is not an adequate solution, but it's an example of a solution. Now, this, of course, Right. There's a bunch of things. democracies kind of And then you're invited into a civic design process where you actually say, hey, I don't like the tax system. And they're like,

1:20:20 blockchain where you had transparency into all the you know what was getting funding funding. And that would create more trust in government because you could see essentially the Nancy Pelosi's of the world would really have a hard time with that. Right. And we've always had a scale issue, right? In 1776, you could all go into the town hall and bit less virality. We could stop the teenager use in these ways and we'd be better for everyone.

1:22:39 What's a good way to go forward? issues or first strike nuclear policy or monetary policy or anything like that. Here's the various values people care about. What would be the incentive? Who would be incentivized to use that other than the people? And it's pretty clear that the people don't have control over Facebook, actually see how government spending worked? Can we create transparency at scale? Can we recreate things like, as you were mentioning, people would freak out if they could actually see how government spending worked?

1:25:31 If the transparency has not existed up until now, why would they ever allow some sort of issues are too complex for individuals to understand, so you need institutions. But how do It would be, but it seems like that's the only way people really change the way they think about things is something, some almost like cultural near-death experience has to take place.

1:27:36 If a lion was in this situation or a gazelle, they can't understand their own mind and realize they have the one marshmallow mind to have an AI overlord that runs everything because we're too irrational and nasty. As you get so much power that you can't keep being bad stewards of it, either the experiment self-terminates or you are forced to step up into being adequate stewards of it.

1:29:28 We can see that if you look at Jains. bugs based on conditioning across the whole scope of human nature, the genetics in it. You go to a can we create a gradient that's like this is where there used to be this But we don't see it. Like, we can now all see it. Because Facebook is this 3 billion person AI optimized behavior machine, right? There's a lot of actually quite constructive content on the internet. And imagine that you

1:33:02 We're not going to do it. And inside of it, there's a bunch of shit about how they can spy on your bank account. Yeah, it's a tricky proposition. It's not just tricky. It changes the way the You do have control over what you share and retweet. Ask that of the government on their psychology, on their future, I have a good friend, Ari Shafir, and he ran an experiment on YouTube where he only looked

1:36:49 Facebook does fucks, when they There's a problem with the way that company distributes information because you're not allowing people to make the decisions that they could make to clean up their algorithm, to clean up what they get influenced by, to clean up what their news feed looks like. experiment in the presence of that much advertising? Do they understand marketing?

1:38:34 that's not gonna we're not gonna be able to get out of that because if it's playing to my And in the Carnegie Endowment, they did a sort of meta-analysis for the problem of misinformation. that's not going to be an adequate solution. to do that you can get like highly motivated people to do that. You can get really intelligent, really conscientious people that are considering the impact that their choices have on their future.

1:41:17 So that's why they get trapped doing this. Right. Right. Now this is where we It's a bunch of like incredibly diverse, what are you selling? They look cool. Like, what is this? But see, the same thing. the tiger lets go of the buffalo. This is not going to be fun. So a few things to say. It was like 2009 to 2011. Right. and that virtual world doesn't care about protecting

1:46:27 and it's not trying to protect to make sure those fundamental capacities keep going through deforestation and so on, that's very similar to a virtual reality that's not protecting from say 25 screen time with only the laptop the ar can take us up to like approaching 100 screen we're actually looking at our phones. We would say from the Center for Humane Technology kind

1:49:08 you use FaceTime, it doesn't have like, here's comments, here's notifications, here's the hearts you have the operating system that engages with that hardware, but there's all these different We're going to give you the option to not have advertisers track you and apps track you everywhere. That is a wonderful solution. likes or hates. A stronger Here's a crazy move for you.

1:51:31 top-down, take control with their app store. But these social media apps are free apps. want to take control or if the media is ever criticizing social media, it's just because the on their system. So now there's a cynical take there, but here's the move. If they wanted to That might be the only solution. They keep going up and down. to come to the United States and actually say, we're going to build a civic tech ecosystem.

1:54:46 this path than the path of wanton destruction. Because we know that about alcoholics and And it's so much healthier for you. said and then they go read and I'm like, my God, man, get out of there. I was going to say, I was just thinking the same thing. And people, yeah, and people, I think, stood further apart or something like this. same way that that's an epitome of the problem. That's your personal version of the social dilemma.

1:57:55 damaging, but it's very difficult. And I think it's got to be an across the board decision that That's not what I said. issue, how do you express yourself? How do you get your point of view? If you think your point the extreme voices participate more often than the moderate voices. So if you actually ask in their research, like, So part of this mind warp is we have to actually, again, understand that we're seeing a very

2:01:03 And it's fucking silly that we only have two groups in this country. That's why this show works. Your mammalian instincts that things are upside down, Yeah, it's true. For real. But that doesn't actually do much about the fragility of decentralized drones. It doesn't do much about the fragility of decentralized cyber weapons. have the capacity to, small and large groups,

2:02:57 believing in whatever the dominant British empire thought at the time was. They removed themselves And so they first, they remove themselves from the toxicity. Second, they work to actually start but there's the January 6th version of that, which we don't want. They brought in all these Ethernet cables, and they set up a Wi-Fi network And it's possible to do that. That's a real working example. I want people to really check

2:05:33 was federal agents that were involved in instigating the violence, instigating the entering into federal charges and four years plus in jail. You take a peaceful protest. It's been documented that that is what happened. there where any like he did it pre January 6th he did it during the January this one. I remember the umbrella I don't know the case at all, but is it that somebody in government actually initiated him doing it as an agent provocateur to shut down the protest?

2:08:36 Yeah. telling them they gotta go inside And these people are like, Because they do do it. Meet Ray Epps the Fed protected provocateur who appears to have led the very first Here it is. Arrest Ray Epps. of the innovation and provisioning of resources because they do a good job, but we still want rule of law because there are places where markets will have a financial incentive for

2:11:40 larger scale messed that up and also having so many things that were issues of national security The Capitol. Hear that what? We are going to the Capitol where our problems are. Yeah, you don't need to get shot. because you have 100,000 different cameras pointed at this guy. Congratulations. earnestly. And so it was like some Into the Storm? and it gave them hope and happiness.

2:15:02 like this comes up and you get You can be a patriot. They take a leak and they check it And they're like, what have I done with my life? Jamie wheel, uh, who's here in Austin, we had him on our podcast to talk about this. which includes also some of the decentralized ways that they can use those tools to cause havoc. when books were really hard to get, but we could print a newspaper so everybody could know what

2:18:15 estate. Rather than share something where everybody gets the same information to then Because how do you incentivize the Zuckerbergs or whatever? happening a few weeks from now where one set of people have been all exposed to this guy. And this is that we were built to assume with my brain constructs reality from my eyeballs. So I have what someone else's views are on a topic. You think all Republicans are racist or something

2:21:56 would get kind of upregulated to be at the center of our shared undivided attention. One of the things they agree to is, what would I need to change my mind about this? If the answer I believe X. because it's losing its monopoly on truth. Partial truth, but not complete. Go on. I think I got the name right. identity held different realities? And then also apply that to how you design technology.

2:25:01 It is true that the worser vices, the worser devils or whatever you call them, of who we are and order a beer. Totally. it's connection. Most of those time blocks are like, spend another five seconds doing this with your I mean, who's the angriest people? Incels, right? When people get really angry, If it doesn't do that, it's not going to work. stimuli. We know that GDP is not a good metric of the health of a society because GDP goes up when

2:28:15 Right. really unique position where their business model is not addicting people, polarizing talking about like indulging primarily in these choices whether it's porn or fast food or gambling or alcohol or whatever these problems are that people have this like deeply cut groove that you're stuck in. The default mode network. Yes. And I think if we're dealing with anything that is a possible potential real solution

2:31:23 educated people where they meant both a kind of moral education and development of people as well as being by itself, I have seen narcissists and sociopaths get more severely that way using psychedelics because it just creates reinforcement. And, you know, and the choices can be made that way. And it's one of the things they said about TikTok. we're promoting Apple in this podcast, and I just wanted to say this.

2:34:40 towards long-term health of people. We're going to do Apple Fitness. We're going to do things like I don't have any product or anything like here instead of I could open up this app or that app, instant hit. I was thinking about something, Joe, when you were asking like what are the solutions Well, you have to work all the muscles and you have to work them in lots of different ways.

2:36:45 which nutrient do you need or which muscle do you need to work out? Like the problems are complex. than the culture seems to be going in. Obviously, they have asymmetric marketing power. the operating system inside of which Facebook has to sit. And then all the various ways that fascinating thing to observe when you're watching someone who has ungodly amounts of wealth,

2:39:08 insiders, you know, occasionally, and they'll tell me that at the end of the day, with a lot that collapses society. post all these Facebook files and said, like, I'm actually trapped by the shareholder model an evil person. Maybe that's it. That's a total possibility, right? capitalist, and some really ruthless CEO got a hold of Facebook. And they said, listen, our

2:42:23 And near term, like how many years? Okay. all capital into one thing. anymore. So specifically, his thinking was, it's inevitable that that will happen. It will be When people understand the catastrophic risks and they don't see any good possibility out, then oftentimes they will Matthew Feeney, Jr.: So it's very, very smart people. catastrophes come from not being able to create order in the presence of this excessive tech.

2:45:51 and Stanford and the State Department and wherever, and in Ethereum, working on those issues, That's what we're kind of saying right now. Take a breath into that. It's so easy to slide right back into it. They do. The question is, are we the people, the culture, going to be able to identify what we don't want and then steer ourselves in the direction of what we do?

2:48:29 Trevor Burrus This is also like – here we are. It's actually very hard for people to grasp the whole scope of the technological complexity. Well, only because we have a whole system, trillion dollar market cap system dependent Occasionally, but the social media algorithms don't reward them by and large, right? They take Was it 1984 that Apple came up with that computer?

2:51:21 So this is pre-internet. and we will bury them with their own confusion. We ended our last conversation with me giving you... Steve Jobs had a direct role in it. Yeah, this one will probably be similar they don't realize the dramatic transformative impact that those things can have on cultures. and it doesn't seem good. It's wild. polarization algorithms messed up the fourth estate, also messing up education. It doesn't

2:55:24 You just say one cynical perspective and I'm right and that's the only thing I'm going to think. It's like accentuating the worst examples like little drive-by, like, because it's pulling from all these different moments Like people think that juice is good for you, like orange juice. impactful moments without And so my feed just became filled all police interactions. But even though I knew I was curating my feed for this purpose,

2:59:02 than I can possibly take in, and it can be totally statistically unrepresentative, And hopefully that gets into some people's brains It's hard. I get it. real innovative solutions in how we think about it. And I think because of this, more people will Let's end in a positive note.