Tristan Harris

So this is exploiting like a backdoor in the human mind.

So think of it just like software has backdoors and zero-day vulnerabilities.

You can hack software.

The human mind has vulnerabilities.

And as a magician as a kid, I understood some of those.

Studying at a lab at Stanford called the Persuasive Technology Lab, where a lot of the Instagram co-founders had studied.

I understood the psychological influences dynamics.

And so it wasn't just that we were making technology in this beautiful and empowering kind of Macintosh way.

It's that basically more and more of my friends were sucked into developing technology to hack human psychology.

And so I saw that problem.

I became concerned about it.

And I made a presentation at Google saying,

And I feel like I repeat the story everywhere, but it's just important for my history, I guess.

I made a presentation saying never before in history have 50 designers in San Francisco basically, through their choices, rewired the entire psychological habitat of humanity.

And we need to get this right.

We have a moral responsibility to get this right.

And I sent it to 50 people at Google.

And when I clicked on the presentation the next day, on the top right of Google Slides, it shows you the number of simultaneous viewers.

You know how that works?

And it had like 150 simultaneous viewers and then 500 simultaneous viewers.