#1736 - Tristan Harris & Daniel Schmachtenberger

Joe Rogan (0:04)

The Joe Rogan Experience. Gentlemen, thank you for being here. Once, let's, 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)

I am Tristan Harris, and came on the show about a year ago after The Social Dilemma came out. That's probably where most people know me. It used to be a design ethicist at Google, studying how do you ethically influence people's attention and thoughts and behaviors.

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 line, is that the issues of social media, which I know we're going to talk about today, are connected to a number of other issues that are going wrong in society, that are all kind of interconnected. I've learned a tremendous amount from Daniel, and I thought it would help really clarify some of these issues for everyone.

Joe Rogan (1:04)

Well, thank you, Daniel. Thanks for coming aboard.

Daniel Schmachtenberger (1:06)

Thanks for having me here.

Joe Rogan (1:06)

What a daunting task, how to ethically influence people. What a weird thing that this industry that didn't exist 20 years ago has such a, I mean, think about life on earth, and then 20 years ago, all of a sudden this social media thing sort of 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.

Daniel Schmachtenberger (1:36)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (1:36)

What the fuck does that even mean?

Tristan Harris (1:39)

Well, first of all, I should say-

Joe Rogan (1:40)

How do those thoughts even 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, as was shown in the film The Social Dilemma, wrote this presentation worried about how technology was influencing people's thoughts, concerns, behaviors, et cetera. I studied persuasive technology at Stanford, which is a whole discipline and field, the idea that technology can influence people. It was out of my own personal concern that when that presentation went viral at Google, I worked my way into this position that never existed before, which was, how could we create a framework for what it means to ethically influence other people?

A lot of that has to do with asymmetries of power. When I was a kid, I was a magician. We talked about this before.

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. Actually, across some of the issues 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.

Joe Rogan (2:44)

When you were studying at Stanford, what year was this?

Tristan Harris (2:48)

This was 2002 to 2006 I was an undergrad, and then 2006, I got involved with Professor BJ Fogden, 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.

But I got concerned 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. 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 attention company doesn't add the beautification filter, the other one will.

If one company doesn't do narcissism, social validation hacking and likes and variable rewards, the other one will.

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 going to build the drone for everyone. That's how I think these things are connected.

Joe Rogan (3:54)

Did you realize it back then? I mean, 2002, 2006, you're talking on a completely different world in terms of social media.

Tristan Harris (4:00)

It's before the iPhone, actually.

Joe Rogan (4:01)

2007, right?

Tristan Harris (4:03)

iPhone came out in 2007 We were studying persuasive technology. I've said in the past, 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.