Tristan Harris

Here's a photo of my bike ride down to the bakery in San Francisco.

That's what Kevin Systrom used to post when he was just starting it.

I was probably one of the first 100 users of the app.

And later you see how these sort of simple products that had a simple, good, positive intention got sort of sucked into these perverse incentives.

And so Google acquired my company called Apture.

I landed there and I joined the Gmail team.

And I'm with these engineers who are designing the email interface that people spend hours a day in.

And then one day one of the engineers comes over and he says, well, why don't we make it buzz your phone every time you get an email?

And he just asked the question nonchalantly like it wasn't a big deal.

And in my experience, I was like, oh my God, you're about to change billions of people's psychological experiences with their families, with their friends at dinner, with their date night on romantic relationships, where suddenly people's phones are going to be busy showing notifications of their email.

And you're just asking this question as if it's like a throwaway question.

And I became concerned – I see you have a slide deck there.

I do, yeah.

About basically how Google and Apple and social media companies were hosting this psychological environment that was going to corrupt and frack the global human attention of humanity.

And I basically said I needed to make a slide deck.

It's 130-something pages slide deck that basically was a message to the whole company at Google saying we have to be very careful and we have a moral responsibility in how we shape the global attentions of humanity.

MARK MANDELMAN- How was that received at Google?

MARK MANDELMAN- I was very nervous, actually, because I felt like I wasn't coming from some place where I wanted to stick it to them or be controversial.

I just felt like there was this conversation that wasn't happening.

And I sent it to about 50 people that were friends of mine just for feedback.