Joe Rogan | Does Facebook Need to be Broken Up?

Yeah. Unintended consequences are something that I've been taking very seriously lately when I'm paying attention to technology as it's used in social media. Particularly, one of the things that's disturbed me quite a bit over the last few weeks is that there's a model that they use, and not intentionally, but there's a model that they use to get people upset about things, show you things in your feed that you argue against, because that makes you click on them more and you engage in them more. And because of the fact that we have this advertiser-based model where people are trying to get clicks because they want to get ads on their page and the more clicks they get, the more money they get from those ads. And so they want to incentivize people to go there and the best way through the algorithm, they've found without doing it on purpose, is to get people upset. Yeah, and they're pushing people into these little information ghettos that are really dangerous. Right, and we've gotten to this point where this is just an accepted part of our lives, that you go to check your Google feed or your Facebook feed and go, oh boy, what the fuck are they doing? Is this real? They're going to pass this? God damn it. And then you get mad, and then you engage with people online, and then it results in more revenue. But getting them to stop that. If you had to go to Facebook and say, hey, hey Mark Zuckerberg, I know you have fucking the $100 billion, whatever you got, but you can't make any more money this way. Because what you're doing is fucking up society. Because you're encouraging dissent. You're encouraging people to be upset and arguments, and you're doing it at great financial reward but great societal cost. So stop. He's not going to do it, right? Well he may not do it, but that comes back to the point about regulation. The question is how big is your stick? Well one of the guys who was the founder of Facebook, yes, is now coming out and saying that Facebook needs to be broken up. And then he was one of the original founders, and he's like, it has gotten so far out of hand, it's so far away from where it is, it's literally affecting global politics. Yeah, well it is. And so one option is to break it up. It seems to have worked pretty well with AT&T. Another option is to regulate it, which in my mind would be a better approach. And that is to say, here's what's okay, and here's what's not okay. And this stuff is really intricate. You have to really get down beneath these algorithms, which are unbelievably complex, but you're exactly right. I mean what we're seeing now is we are being pushed into, I said information ghettos, but it's like information barricades. Yeah, pushed into camps. Which camp are you on? And it's so dangerous because the old, I mean this country is based on not everybody agreeing, but having a process where people come and they work it out and they say, you know, I'm not perfectly happy with this outcome, but here's a compromise. And if we can't compromise, then our civic culture is going to break down. And there's so much, I mean people don't see these pillars that are holding up our society. I lived in Cambodia for two years. And if you don't have these civic pillars under your society, societies look very, very different. Everyone's life experiences. We kind of take for granted, you can go out the door, walk to Starbucks and not get shot. Or you can have your house, something happens, your house gets robbed, you call the police, and the police aren't the ones who've robbed your house. Or they're not, I mean there's all these kinds of crazy things. If we break down the foundations that underpin our lives, that's really dangerous. What I was kind of getting at was that through what this process of this algorithm, how this algorithm selects things that shows you in your feed and how people are getting upset by this and how this is generating massive amounts of revenue, once it's already happened, it's very difficult to stop. And my concern would be that this would be a similar thing when it comes to genetic engineering. We're saying we need to be able to put regulations on this, we need to be able to establish it. But once it gets out of the bag, once it gets rolling, and I have, you remember when Mark Zuckerberg sat in front of all those politicians, they had no fucking idea what they were talking about? How do you make money? Just such piss poor prepares. And it just shows you, like these are the people that are looking out for us, good fucking luck. These are luddites. They're dumbasses. They're fools, right? And they don't know anything about- Some are. Some are. Almost everyone was underwhelming and under impressive. In that hearing, absolutely. In that hearing. The fact that they're dealing with one of the most important moments of our time, but they didn't bring on some sort of a legitimate technology expert who could explain the pitfalls of this and do so in a way that the rest of the world's going to know. So they're not going to protect us from genetic engineering either, right? Because they're generalists in terms of their education for the most part, and they're not concerned. They're concerned with raising money for their campaign, they're concerned with getting reelected. That's their concern. Yeah, I totally agree with you that if we wait to focus on this issue until it becomes a crisis, it's going to be too late because all the big decisions will have been made. The reason why I wrote this book, the reason why I'm on my almost week three of this book tour doing events like this every day is what I am saying in every form that I can is this is really important. We were watching the news yesterday, they had this royal baby in the UK. Like I don't give a shit, it doesn't affect my life in any way, but what is at play now is the future of our entire species and our democracy and our lives. And we have to be focusing on those things because we have a moment now where we can, to a certain extent, influence how these revolutions play out. And if we just wait around, if we're distracted and we're focusing on all this stuff that's sucking up our attention and whether it's Trump or Brexit or Mueller and all these things, I mean, we're spending, how much of our time are we spending focused on this? Fine, let's pay a little bit of attention, but there's really big stuff. 50 years from now, 100 years from now, no one's going to look back and say, oh, that was the age of Trump. They're going to say that was the age when after almost 4 billion years of evolution, humans took control of their own evolutionary process and it's huge and it's going to change all of life. And what I'm trying to do is to say everybody has to have a seat at the table, whether you're a conservative Christian, whether you're a biohacking transhumanist, everybody needs to be at the table because we're talking about is the future of our species. We're talking about the future of our species, but are we even capable of understanding the consequences of these actions, the stuff that we're discussing? Like right now, I'm not. Like I'm talking about it, but I mean, if someone said, hey, you've got to go speak in front of people about the consequences of it, in a very clear one hour presentation, I'd be like, no, I'm not. I don't know what I'm talking about. Well, one, we can go together, so you're good. Thank you. But two, the reason why I've written this book Hacking Darwin is I wanted to say if you could read just one book and it's written just for everybody in a very clear way with a lot of jokes that I think are funny, my mother laughed at them as well, that you get it. And once you know just the basics as a human being, anybody, it has an equal right to be part of this conversation as the top scientist or the leaders of any country. I would agree with you there, but I don't think that other people are going to see it that way. I think the people that are in control, they're not going to say, hey, we need to be fair with everyone, all the citizens of the world. How do you feel we should proceed? But that's why we need this bottom-up groundswell, but we can't have a bottom-up groundswell if people, if just general people aren't even aware of what the issues are. And that's the challenge and that's why forums like yours are just so important. I mean, you have all of these people and then maybe everyone doesn't listen to this podcast and say, all right, I get it. I can go give that hour-long speech. But you can read a couple books and then you can give an hour speech because the issues, like yes, there are scientific issues, but this isn't a conversation about science. This is about values and ethics in our future. And it has to be a conversation for everybody. Yeah, it's not just a scientific conversation. It's a conversation about the future of this species and what the species will become. And that's something we're wholly unqualified. But here's a little vote for optimism. We have never been this literate as a species. We've never been this educated. I don't think we've ever been this nice either. I hope so. I really do. When you look at all the wars and all the murder that used to happen, it's actually, this is the best time ever to be alive. Still sucks for people that are in bad situations. For sure, no, but it's on average it's better. And we've never been this connected. So we have, so I'm the book, I call for a species-wide dialogue on the future of human genetic engineering. You think, well, that's nuts. Seven billion people on earth. How are they going to do that? But we have the opportunity and we have to try because you don't want, like with the beginning of the genetically modified crops era, the scientists were actually really responsible. Regular people weren't consulted and they felt these guys just did it to me. So if you have all the marchers with genetically modified organisms, we are entering the era of genetically modified humans and that's going to scare the shit out of people. And so we need to start preparing and we need to make people feel that they're respected and included and our government leaders aren't going to do it for us. So we have to find ways of engaging ourselves. And that's why with me with the book, I set up a website where people can share their views, debate with other people. I really want everybody to be part of this conversation.