Tristan Harris

That's crazy.

But what do you think?

So I did a program at Stanford called the Mayfield Fellows Program that took engineering students and then taught them entrepreneurship.

You know, I, as a computer scientist, didn't know anything about entrepreneurship, but they pair you up with venture capitalists.

They give you mentorship.

And, you know, there's a lot of powerful alumni who were part of that program.

The co-founder of Asana, the co-founders of...

of Instagram were both part of that program.

And that put us in kind of a cohort of people who

were basically ending up at the center of what was going to colonize the whole world's psychological environment, which was the social media situation.

And as part of that, I started my own tech company called Apture.

And we basically made this tiny widget that would help people find more contextual information without leaving the website they were on.

It was a really cool product that was about deepening people's understanding.

And I got into the tech industry because I thought that technology could be a force for good in the world.

That's why I started my company.

And then I kind of realized through that experience that at the end of the day, these news publishers who used our product, they only cared about one thing, which is, is this increasing the amount of time and eyeballs and attention on our website?

Because eyeballs meant more revenue.

And I was in sort of this conflict of, I think I'm doing this to help the world, but really I'm measured by this metric of what keeps people's attention.

That's the only thing that I'm measured by.

And I saw that conflict play out among my friends who started Instagram because they got into it because they wanted people to share little bite-sized moments of your life.