Joe Rogan on Phone Addiction

Especially if one is broad-minded about thinking about all the ways that one can engage in rent-seeking, one can actually be destructive of value. If you destroy future well-being for our descendants, it may look productive in the present, but it isn't productive. It's actually destructive. So that's a kind of rent-seeking that we don't even typically model. But where are we headed? So oh yes. So we live in a game-theoretic landscape. That's both good and bad. As you point out, competition is a healthy thing. And competition in markets produces a huge amount of value. So I hear people deriding capitalism, and I always want to make the same point to them, which is you've got two things glued together, and you are challenging them as a package. But there's no reason they have to be packaged. So we would be foolish to give up markets. Markets are amazingly powerful engines of innovation. They are capable of solving problems that we cannot solve deliberately, even if we wanted to. So we need markets. But we don't want markets ruling the planet and deciding that anything that spits out a profit is therefore good and that we should be exposed to whatever the market discovers can be viable. So what we want is ultimately to provide incentive structures that cause the market to produce things that are good for us. In other words, if you tell the market that you want the solution to some problem, the market can figure out how to solve that problem, and it will do it very well. But if you allow the market to decide what problems to solve, it may end up, for example, addicting you to your phone, right? Addicting you to your phone in a way that harms your social relationships, harms your parenting of your children, harms all kinds of things that are really important, breaks the ability of your children to have an educational experience in school. We don't want the market discovering how to disrupt useful functioning of people. We want the market to stay out of that stuff and then to provide us benefits that only it can provide, like all of the mechanisms that now allow us to navigate seamlessly in places that we've never been avoiding traffic that we wouldn't know to worry about, right? Those are huge benefits, and they're capable of taking a city that is too snarled with traffic and reducing the degree to which it is snarled with traffic. So they're very powerful. But we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Markets are good. Allowing markets to discover any and every mechanism for exploiting you is not good at all. And in fact, it's a large part of why we're in the predicament that we're in, is that we let the market decide what problems to solve. And then if it solves them and they're very lucrative, there's no way to say no. Once... But aren't they just attractive to people? I mean, that's one of the reasons why a phone is so addictive, is because it's attractive, because you can get access to information at the drop of a hat, so you just constantly want to feed that machine. You constantly want to like, oh, what can I do? Can I play a game on it? Ooh, can I take a picture of myself? Ooh, can I give myself a dog nose? Ooh. Right. But imagine, I mean, it's amazing to me that it's even hard to do this thought experiment, but put yourself in your own mind 15 years ago and present yourself the deal that the phone represents. You know, hey, Joe, check this phone out, right? This phone is going to allow you to navigate in a place you've never been. It's going to connect you with all sorts of people who share your interests. You're going to be able to say a sentence that you think is clever and suddenly hundreds or thousands of people are going to be able to react to it. I mean, all sorts of marvelous things. And then the point is, well, here's the downside, okay? You're going to be hooked into megacorporations that are going to study your psychology and they are going to compete in order to keep you paying attention to their sight. And they're going to become so sophisticated that you're going to lose control over your own mind. You are going to become addicted to it in the way that you might become addicted to nicotine, right? So that's a pretty high cost. What's more, you are going to surveil yourself. You're going to surveil yourself and your only protection from surveilling yourself are going to be end user license agreements that you're not going to be legally sophisticated enough to understand. And so you're going to be at the mercy of whoever has access to your phone camera, your metadata, all of these things. So the point is, if you said this to you 15 years ago, you'd know to be afraid of it, right? I probably wouldn't. You wouldn't? I'd probably be like, ah, I'll put it down if I don't like it. Okay. Well, I must tell you, if you told me that I was going to be bugging myself with a sophisticated device like that, then I can't even turn it upside down because there's a camera on both sides of the damn thing. Right. Right. The cost is really high, but we signed up for it incrementally in a way that never left the ability to say no. And what's worse, it is now inconceivable if we discovered that the net cost of such a device exceeded the value of it by 10 times. We still couldn't get rid of them. You can't pull them back. You can't unmake them. There's too much benefit to them though. You're making it seem as if it's only a negative, but it's not only a negative. It's also answering every single question you could ever have about anything technical, anything involving history, anything involving facts. And obviously in today's day and age with hashtag fake news, you're going to get a lot of bullshit facts in there as well. But just the sheer access to information, the ability to contact each other instantaneously, there's a lot of pros to it. Huge number. I'm, believe me, I'm not under rating the value of it. You pointed to it yourself. Having even just Wikipedia in your pocket is like, that's such a fantastic gift to have that access to information not only on your home computer, but right there in your pocket. That's amazing. So I'm not saying the benefit isn't spectacular. And I've signed up for it like everybody else, but the cost is very high and didn't have to be. In other words, if you had set the bounds in which the market was going to solve this problem so that you, for example, prevented it from breaching our ability to protect our own privacy, you could have had the benefit of Wikipedia and instant communication and all of these things without the huge downside. So the privacy issue being cookies or cameras? Like which one are you referring to? Well, first of all, I think the cameras are a bit of a red herring. I don't think anybody, first of all, there's a huge amount of data involved in video. To the extent there's an issue, it would be more about the microphone and the fact that it can listen into conversations and basically track who's thinking what. And there's so much power in that potentially that even if it's not being used presently, it's only a matter of time before somebody taps into that data and starts using it to shape things they are not entitled to shape.