#1558 - Tristan Harris

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience.

Good to have you here, man. You were just telling me before we went on air, the numbers of The Social Dilemma and their bonkers. So just say that.

Tristan Harris (0:25)

Yeah, The Social Dilemma was seen by 38 million households in the first 28 days on Netflix, which I think is broken records. And if you assume, you know, a lot of people are seeing it with their family because parents seeing it with their kids, the issues that are on teen mental health.

So if you assume one out of 10 families saw it with a few family members, we're in the 40 to 50 million people range, which is just broken records, I think, for Netflix. I think it was the second most popular documentary throughout the month of September. Or film throughout the month of September.

Joe Rogan (0:56)

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

Tristan Harris (1:16)

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. I remember I was been working on these issues for something like eight or eight years or something now.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

You please tell people who didn't see the documentary what your background is and how you got into it.

Tristan Harris (1:45)

Yeah, so the film goes back as a set of technology insiders. My background was as a design ethicist at Google. So I first had a startup company that we sold to Google and I landed there through a talent acquisition. And then started work about a year into being at Google, made a presentation that was about how essentially technology was holding the human collective psyche in its hands. That we were really controlling the world's psychology. Because every single time people look at their phone, they are basically experiencing thoughts and scrolling through feeds and believing things about the world. This has become the primary meaning-making machine for the world.

And that we as Google had a moral responsibility to 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.

So my background was as a kid, I was a magician. We can get into that. I studied at a lab at Stanford, or studied in a class called the Stanford Persuasive Technology Class that taught a lot of the engineers in Silicon Valley kind of how the mind works. Some of the co-founders of Instagram were there.

And then later studied behavioral economics and how the mind is sort of influenced. I went into cults and started studying how cults work and then arrived at Google through this lens of, you know, technology isn't really just this thing that's in our hands. It's more like this manipulative environment that is tapping into our weaknesses, everything from the slot machine rewards to, you know, the way you get tagged in a photo and it sort of manipulates your social validation and approval, these kinds of things.

Joe Rogan (3:26)

When you were at Google, did they still have the Don't Be Evil sign up?

Tristan Harris (3:30)

I don't know if there was actually a physical sign, was there?

Joe Rogan (3:33)

There was never a physical sign? I thought there was something that they actually had.

Tristan Harris (3:36)

I think it was, there was this guy, was it Paul? Not Paul, what was his last name? He was the inventor, one of the inventors of Gmail, and they had a meeting and they came up with this mantra because they realized the power that they had and they realized that there was going to be a conflict of interest between advertising on the search results and regular search results. And so they knew that they could have used that power and they came up with this mantra I think in that meeting in the early days to don't be evil.

Joe Rogan (4:01)

There was a time where they took that mantra down and I remember reading about it online.

Tristan Harris (4:07)

They took it off their page, I think.

Joe Rogan (4:08)

That's what it was. And when I read that, I was like, that should be big news. Like, there's no reason to take that down. Why would you take that down?