Joe Rogan's Thoughts on The Social Dilemma

Oh, you know what I did want to talk to you about? Yeah. I watched the social dilemma. Oh jeez. Dude. You know. That's a must-see, kids. I heard it's depressing. Oh, so is real life. Because it's so real. Real life's depressing, Tom. What's in you? Everything's gonna be fine. Wear a mask. I live in communist Russia. Wear a mask, trust me. Gavin Newsom's penis tastes delicious. We're all gonna be fine. We are gonna be fine. You think we exist on this plane and this plane only. Ooh, that's heavy. No. No, because I've done a lot of drugs. I think there's probably something else. Have you seen? I think there's something. No. I think there's something else out there, but just inaccessible right now. Yeah. But this social dilemma makes me very concerned about the future. Because all of these technologists and all of these people that have invented all this stuff that now are very unhappy. Yeah. It's really fascinating to see them discussing their own creations and see outsiders who are also technologists who didn't invent these things but are seeing the patterns in these things and understand it from a really educated perspective. They're saying this could lead to civil war. Like people are getting more and more divided. And it shows in the film how social media has made people far more polarized, far more divided than ever before. The red and the blue and the this. Sure. You know, it's like... It's disturbing. What's the most dangerous part of it? And can it be corrected? Well, there's a lot of dangerous parts about it. But the thought bubbles. The fact that these people get in these bubbles of thought where everybody around you thinks your way and everybody who thinks a different way is the enemy. Yeah. This is a really dangerous part of the reality that we live in today because it's not what we anticipated. I thought that the Internet and the age of information and all that we're experiencing right now would bring about an understanding and a nuanced perspective in life in all ways. So you'd be able to see things from other people's perspectives more easily because it'd be more readily available and it would be more encouraged for you to seek out all this information. But a bunch of factors that happen at the same time all have sort of made it worse than ever before. There's social media and the divide that comes, and this is where the social dilemma comes in place. Yeah. There's a divide that comes about because of the way they've engineered these algorithms, which is really disturbing. Yeah. So whatever you're into, it finds those things and accentuates them because it just wants you to stay on more. It wants you to engage more. Sure. It wants you to pay attention to the things. Now, Ari Shafir did a little bit of a study on this, a little bit of a test, and he only YouTubed puppies. That's all he would YouTube, just YouTube puppies, just to see what happened. And all YouTube would send him is puppies. Right. All they would show him, all they would suggest is puppies. Yep. So this idea that they're engineering outrage is a little disingenuous because what they're really doing is finding what you're interested in. And people have been shown to pay attention to what they disagree with far more than what they agree with. The algorithm spits you things that you disagree with more. Exactly, because you get engaged with that and you get angry. Oh. Which is that was a part of the movie. The rage. It was showing how things that people disagree with, things that make people upset. Right. Those are the things that people are much more likely to engage with. And you're like, fuck you, fucking liberals, or fuck you, you fucking racist. Everyone's racist. Right, right. You know, it's like it's this thing that is a part of being a person where you seek, especially when you don't feel like you're really, you're being heard, right? You're at home and you're sitting on the toilet and you're going through Facebook and you see some shit about what the fucking burning the flag, you motherfuckers. And you start making these messages and you're more likely to do that than seeing some beautiful story about these parents that adopt this kid and they give him a home and he comes from a bad part of the world. Like that, you're not going to go, way to go for you. Let me write down all the amazing things about what you're doing. Isn't that terrible? Yeah, you're going to, you're going to get mad or if you're on the left, you're going to get mad because of the wildfires. You're going to blame him on Trump and climate change and all these different things. Yeah. You know, like look. Gets your outrage going. Yeah. I mean, so many people think Trump's responsible for the wildfires. Listen, folks, those fucking fires were going to happen regardless of who is president. Now, whether or not he is putting in policies is going to protect people 10, 20 years from now. Right. That's a real argument. But the fucking fires that are going on right now are not because of Trump. It takes a long time to turn that battleship. Absolutely. Well, Google is better. Yeah. They're much better at it. Yeah. And this, I use my Apple, I have an Apple phone and I have an Android phone. Oh, you do? My Apple phone is my primary phone and I use my Android phone more to fuck around with than anything, but I'm fucking around with a few things on it. And one of the things is how well it picks up your voice and how well it transcribes it. So here's the argument. Right. Apple is much better with your privacy. They're much better with your privacy. Like when you use Apple Maps, it's not sending your data to anyone. Right. But it's one of the reasons why Apple Maps is not as good. Google Maps are better. Because they're sharing it. It's just better. They just it's they're getting data constantly from you. They're getting data from all the other drivers. They're sharing that data. They're compiling that data. And they're also sending ads your way to profit off of this to make it profitable. So because of that, because Google is just sucking up data constantly, they can provide you with better services. So they have an amazing search engine. But that was one of the things about the social dilemma. The search engine gives different results based on where you are. Like say if you type, they use an example, climate change. If you write climate change is, it might say a hoax or climate change is a terrible threat depending on where you live. Just where you are. Like you live in California. Right. It might give you one thing. But if you live in Waco, Texas, it might give you another thing. Yeah. And it's based on what it thinks you want to see. That's crazy. It's not good. That's not good. That's why you're enforcing people's dumb ideas. That's why I use Duck Duck Go. Duck Duck Go does not do any of that stuff. And it also it gives you things. It doesn't send your data somewhere. It protects your privacy. So you put climate change is on Duck Duck Go. No, I put chicks with dicks. Whoa. No one knows. I got a burner phone with Duck Duck Blow on it. You put whatever you want. It's just the results are not curated. So it's just giving you the most applicable results for the things that you're looking for. But it's not doing it in a way where it's curating it for your own interests. Like if you try to find things that are controversial, we've tried to find that on the podcast before, where Jamie will Google something and I'll know it to be correct. But Google will not show that it's correct because maybe the correct answer is not politically correct. So you have to go through several pages and maybe you even have to Google it in a very specific way to get to the heart of the science behind what's wrong with the consensus opinion. The consensus opinion might be wrong. That's the case with a lot of nutrition things. It's the case with a lot of things regarding anything controversial. Anything where there's a political motive to sway the argument one way or the other. It's so amazing how deep you have to dive to cross reference stuff to really try and assemble a truthful opinion. It's so hard. So with all this stuff, do you do the and you have all these people from Twitter and Google and stuff who are saying like what we did or Facebook was horrible and we really kind of f things up. Do they feel like they can also correct this problem? I don't know if you can put the cap on the bottle. I don't know if you can do that. I don't know if you can do that. I don't know if they know it either because they didn't think it was going to happen in the first time. Remember Jack Dorsey was testifying I think it was before Congress and he was saying that 12 years ago when we created Twitter, we had no idea that this was going to be a situation that we had to anticipate. No one ever saw this coming. And if you go back and see the early Twitter when you would remember you would do the at it would always show your name in front of every tweet. So it'd be like at Tom Papa is having pizza. You would say what you were doing. It was really weird like how people would use Twitter. But it was like not political. It was just fun. People just like no one knew what to do with it. And then somewhere along the line people started figuring out how to get in the arguments. It's so bad. We just always ruin everything. It could be so great. I remember when it first came out it was like wow there would probably never have been slavery if there had been Twitter because people would have exposed it so early and just seemed so hopeful. But of course all the scummy people get it and then just ruin it. It makes me scummy too because it makes people more polarized. It makes me more aggressive in reinforcing their idea what the truth is and trying to stop other people. And it's just like seeing so much suppression of other people's opinions and expression today which is so strange. It's just it's one of the weirdest times ever to look at the way human beings communicate because of the tension. We were talking about this earlier. We never really finished the thought. But you got Trump then you get the pandemic and then you get the economic collapse. You have all these things happening. So people are they're desperate. They're sad. And then you've got looting and you've got the riots and you see you get racial tension. You've got violence. You've got this anti police sentiment which also leads to more instability in the streets. More instability in the cities and less safety and fear fear fear of fear of police fear of gangs fear fear of Antifa fear of white supremacists fear of everything. It's like all this fucking fear. Yeah. And unless you don't have people arguing online. Yeah. Really literally addicted people. Yeah. People were addicts. Right. Exactly. They're just as addicted as people who are gambling addicts just as addicted to people that are sex addicts. They're addicted to Twitter. Yeah. And they're argue they're mentally ill people and they're constantly engaging in conflict. Right. And they're coming up on people's posts and you don't know that you're interacting with mentally ill people. Yeah. Or or people from other countries that are trying to incite it. Assume you're acting with mentally unwell people because almost everyone who's using it in that way is it in one way or another mentally ill. Or you put your phone in the drawer and you go to the park and all of a sudden everything calms down. You get shot and then there's no cops because you want to defund the police. Everything calms down and goes away. Well it should. Because you're not and you're not living in this weird reality. Yeah. You're just living in real life and you're not participating in all of that. That's what we would all hope for. The problem is there's so many people that are doing it. Yeah. Whether they're doing it on Facebook or Twitter or arguing whatever things they're arguing about it's spilling out into the real world. Right. You're in the park being all Zen and all of a sudden a flash mob shows up that organized on Twitter. And you're like what the hell is happening here. I was just all Zen a minute ago. Episodes of the Joe Rogan experience are now free on Spotify. That's right. They're free from September 1st to December 1st. They're going to be available everywhere but after December 1st they will only be available on Spotify but they will be free. That includes the video. The video will also be there. It'll also be free. That's all we're asking. Just go download Spotify. Much love. Bye bye. Bye.