Tristan Harris

The best route is just to accelerate as fast as possible.

And that is not true.

And just to repeat a quote that is heard from every one of my interviews, but I just, it's because it's so accurate.

Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner saying, you know, if you show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcome.

And with the incentives of social media being the race to maximize eyeballs and engagement that would obviously produce the race to the bottom of the brainstem, shortening attention spans, bite-sized video, a more extreme and outrageous content, sexualization of young people, you know, the whole nine yards of everything.

Hyper-partisanship.

Hyper-partisanship.

Yeah.

And all of it happened.

Like there's just a moment just to sort of soak in literally everything that we said was going to happen happened.

And it's not like we could predict all of it, but directionally you could know the contours of where we were going.

And part of this relates to, I think, the mistake we make in technology where we get obsessed and seduced by the possible of a new technology.

But we don't look at the probable of the incentives and what's likely to happen.

So the possible of social media is, well, surely if we give everyone access to instant information at their fingertips and connect people to their friends, we're going to have the least lonely generation we've ever had.

We're going to have the most enlightened and informed society we've ever had.

And obviously the opposite of both of those things happened.

And that's not like, oh, we got this wrong and it was just a mistake anyone could have made.

All you have to do, you know, to quote Donella Meadows and sort of systems thinking, a system is what a system does.

The system of social media was not optimizing to reduce loneliness and to create the most enlightened society.

It was optimizing for just what is the perfect post next video or tweet to keep you scrolling, doom scrolling by yourself, esophagus compressed on a Tuesday night.