Tristan Harris

This special series is presented by The Home Depot.

I am at home in the Bay Area of California right now.

Well, I'm reminded, Scott, of when you and I met in Cannes, I think it was, in France back in 2018, 2017 even.

Wow, that's not long ago.

It was a long time ago.

You know, I have been so for people who don't know my background, I was a design ethicist at Google.

Before that, I was a tech entrepreneur.

I had a tiny startup.

It was talent acquired by Google.

So I've, you know, knew the venture capital thing, knew the startup thing, had friends who were, you know, were the cohort of people who started Instagram and were early employees at all the social media companies.

And so I came up in that milieu in that cohort.

And I say all that because I was close to it.

I really saw how human beings made decisions.

I was probably one of the first hundred users of Instagram.

And I remember when Mike Krieger showed me the app at a party and I was like, I'm not sure if this is going to be a big thing.

And as you go forward, what happened was I was on the Google bus and I saw everyone that I knew getting consumed by these feeds and doom scrolling posts.

And the original ethos that got so many people into the tech industry and got me into the tech industry was about, you know, making technology that would actually be the largest force for positive, you know, good and benefit in people's lives.

And I saw that the entirety of this social media, digital economy, Gmail, people just getting sucked into technology was all really behind it all was this arms race for attention.

And

If we didn't acknowledge that, I basically saw in 2013 how this arms race for attention would obviously, if you just let it run its course, create a more addicted, distracted, polarized, sexualized society.