Tristan Harris

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.

And when I came to work the next day, there was 150.

You know, in the top right on Google Slides, it shows you the number of simultaneous viewers.

And it had 130-something simultaneous viewers.

And then later that day, it was like 500 simultaneous viewers.

And so obviously, it had been spreading virally throughout the whole company.

And people from all around the company emailed me saying, this is a massive problem.

I totally agree.

We have to do something.

And so instead of getting fired, I was invited and basically stayed to become a design ethicist, studying how do you design in an ethical way?

And how do you design for the collective attention spans and information flows of humanity in a way that does not cause all these problems?

Because what was sort of obvious to me then, and that was in 2013, is that if the incentive is to maximize eyeballs and attention and engagement, then you're incentivizing a more addicted, distracted, lonely, polarized, sexualized breakdown of shared reality society.

Because all of those outcomes are success cases of maximizing for engagement for an individual human on a screen.