Tristan Harris

Like, we weren't going to allow that to continue happening.

So we realized that the problem was the business model of maximizing eyeballs and engagement.

We changed the business model.

There was a lawsuit, a big tobacco-style lawsuit for trillions, the trillions of dollars of damage that social media had caused to the social fabric, from mental health costs to lost productivity of society to all of these, to democracies backsliding.

And that lawsuit mandated design changes across how all this technology worked to go against and reverse all of the problems of that engagement-based business model.

We had dopamine emission standards, just like we have car emission standards for cars.

So now when using technology, we turned off things like autoplay and infinite scrolling.

So now using your phone, you didn't feel dysregulated.

we replaced the division-seeking algorithms of social media with ones that rewarded unlikely consensus or bridging.

So instead of rewarding division entrepreneurs, we rewarded bridging entrepreneurs.

There's a simple rule that cleaned up all the problems with technology and children.

which is that Silicon Valley was only allowed to ship products that their own children used for eight hours a day.

Because today, people don't let their kids use social media.

We changed the way we train engineers and computer scientists.

So to graduate from any engineering school, you had to actually comprehensively study all the places that humanity had gotten technology wrong, including forever chemicals or leaded gasoline, which dropped a billion points of IQ, or social media that caused all these problems.

So now we were graduating a whole new generation of responsible technologists, where even to graduate, you had to have a Hippocratic oath, just like they have the white lab coat and the white lab coat ceremony for doctors, where you swear to Hippocratic oath, do no harm.

We changed dating apps and the whole swiping industrial complex.

So that all these dating app companies had to sort of put aside that whole swiping industrial complex and instead use their resources to host events in every major city every week where there was a place to go where they matched and told you where all your other matches were going to go and meet.

So now instead of feeling scarcity around meeting other people, you felt a sense of abundance because every week there was a place where you could go and meet people you were actually excited about and attracted to.

And it turned out that once people were in healthier relationships, about 20% of the polarization online went down.