The LightStyle Interview Series with Tristan Harris | Challenging the Status Quo and Technology

[Music] hi everyone I'm Leila holiday founder of standing lights welcome to the lifestyle interview series I'm super excited to be here in Brooklyn at the Daybreaker headquarters with Tristan Harris who is the co-creator of time well-spent thanks Robby we thank you so much for being here I'm super excited this was so last-minute you know seriously Radha just left and we just replaced it right exactly he just walked in everything's meant to be it's a beautiful synchronicity so I am super excited to shine a light on you today and we met I know we met at one of the day breaker events a while ago and Brad I gave me her amazing day breaker correctly ethanol the Dave Baker garb systems I could be a I love it so Tristan tell us about yourself and what you're doing right now how you're shining your light into the world well I used to so I work on a movement called time we'll spend right now which is basically how do you take the way that the technology industry works and make it work more deeply for people right now a lot of the tech industry is because of the attention economy they have to create this these apps that basically fly for your attention even if you're trying to help people you have to steal people's attention just to get into the game and so how do we change the attention economy so that instead of competing to take attention from people's lives or maximize time spent instead they want to how do you help people maximize time well-spent so that every app or website or media is competing to help people instead of to take time from people and your background is quite interesting you came from Google and what were you doing there well I started before Google at a small startup company that was in this race for attention that's how I got familiar with it and then Google acquired our team and so we landed at Google and by making this presentation about a year into Google I was kind of burnt out by essentially all of this email and the you know calendar invites and just I was there's all this technology all around me but I was asking myself you know is any of this how much of this is really helping make a net positive contribution to my life and how much are we in the tech industry just filling people up with stuff the difference between filling people up with stuff and actually making a positive difference but it's subtle because we get so many benefits from technology and so when I was there at Google for about a year I made this presentation kind of like a manifesto deck and it basically said you know we as Google have a huge responsibility in how we're shaping how a billion people think every day when we put this device in people's hands that opens up a doorway for all these people to grab at your attention and what is our responsibility as Google in protecting people and so this presentation ended up going viral at Google about 5,000 people saw it and it went all the way up to the executive team and it kind of started this little revolution and then I ended up sort of transitioning to be working on design ethics which is how do us eclis shaped people's minds how do you ethically persuade people and so that's what I did at Google for several years and then I left because I realized that the only way to change the system is from the outside you can't do it from inside the big companies so how are you doing that now well a lot of public media and writing and advocacy so one of the problems is that you can't ask snapchat or something or Facebook or Instagram to do less of what they're doing if you said hey you're too good at addicting people you're too good at grabbing people's attention you can't ask them to take less attention because then YouTube's going to swoop in and get the attention that you left on the table competition it's competition and so the only way to do it is to change what they're competing for so instead of competing for just attention and making money from just attention how do we make it so that money and success are tied to benefit now I'm changing the source mm-hmm yeah and you know so that's why we call it time well spent because currently everyone's competing for time spent or engagement as much time spent as possible and how do you instead compete for time well spent so so the part of your of someone's life you're trying to benefit how do you win on those terms so for example how does news win the better at telling people the truth or the better at informing people's understanding versus the better it is at grabbing the next 5 seconds of your time how does Netflix compete in the attention economy not by maximizing how much you watch but by asking what would be time well spent for you and helping you know you watch that one or two movies a week that would are actually time well-spent for you and then not trying to grab your attention beyond that so you can think of it almost like there's this urban plan we live inside of the city and it's kind of disorganized right now we're all getting into accidents we're all getting distracted and the answer isn't like tear down the city it's let's organize the city better so that it works better for people more livable and so right now that attention economy city is this just warzone of things trying to grab your attention jungle it's a jungle if the mess and that doesn't mean we should just you know leave the city it's how do we make the city work for us and right now that sitting is constructed by three private companies Apple Google and Facebook kind of are the predominant urban planners yeah and they never really thought about what it means to make the city liveable for people because they're just making a tool the problem is the incentives are such that everyone wants to build little casinos in the city and there's no space for parks and you know the stuff that we want to live in to write the real nourishing part mm-hmm yeah and so and that's never been done before so how do you even get people to think that way to see themselves to see the designers that say Apple and Google as like a Jane Jacobs who's trying to ask the question like what makes a great you know screen liveable it what makes a great city great what makes a great screen liveable because when people check their phones 150 times a day it's it's people are increasingly living by this device it's fearing more and more of their daily choices but to really help people make the choices that they would want in their life not just to consume more content right we have to ask different questions yeah what would you say are some of the top questions to be asked well I mean to ask what does it mean to spend our time well the ultimate question cookie might - because time well spent over the course of a lifetime is a life well-lived so if I repeatedly make time well spent choices that would be on my deathbed looking back and saying I live my life the way I wanted to and each of us have to answer that question for ourselves but it just gets to a deep question if you're a Google designer your facebook designer when you put stories in front of people are you asking am i helping someone what am i helping someone do am i really caring about whether they're making the life choice that they want to make - the next 10 seconds the next minute the next two hours or am I just caring about maximizing content consumption yeah right now first we have to see that the big question is am I willing to see that my goal is a tech company are actually different than people goals for their lives I'm trying to get them to watch more stuff they want to live their life in the most fulfilling way consumerism makes it such that the people at tech companies are so good with their goals and getting you to do what they want you to do that their goals become our goals meaning that we become kind of infected so we start to go to Facebook because we want to watch things right but that goal didn't come from us we didn't there's no human being who woke up and said you know what I really want to do with my life is watch content but they're so good at giving us this the stuff in spoon-feeding what we'll watch that that becomes our own goal and so part so that's why it's partly a consumer question now what's the spiritual question that day of asking like what what is it that I actually want and if we don't question that we just keep consuming stuff exactly yeah so that's the consumer side but then again on the designer side are in the technology company side asking you know what am I really what benefit am I really trying to provide and then seeing that there really is a difference between caring about someone's life and what I'm helping them or not like a teacher or a therapist or you know someone who's really trying to help versus you know making a technology that I claim is helping make the world more open and connected but really my goals are the maximum lifetime one site and and not to say that that means that you're evil or wrong for doing that just to notice that the goals aren't totally aligned right there right so we have to align the goals what you are doing is so potent it's so important for not just us here in New York or companies or it's literally on a global level as a humanity I mean you're we have to go within and realize that we are these souls having a human experience and everything is affecting us and it's all energy at the end of the day I think and to tailor the questions towards our highest self rather than just being pulled you know by three certain companies or whatever it may be it is it's a it's one of the most important conversations that has to be had at this moment in time because we are changing and growing and shifting at an exponential rate that I don't think it may be a few new it but most of us didn't you know and we're all co-creating this reality right now so people like you coming in and asking these questions I mean thank you because it's so needed yeah I mean the it's really unprecedented it's such a small number of people at a handful of companies in California within like 50 miles of San Francisco you know their choices how they see what being human is about me how what they see as how people - what they understand about how people make choices what steers people's attention right now your attention if I do that whether you want to or not the sound will cause our attention to go there and so we're only kind of as good as the way that the people making technology think about what life is about what being human is about how people make choices and then caring enough to say okay how can I most help someone and and a like you said the scale is unprecedented with such a small number of people effect literally a billion people who use this thing minimum yeah minimum this I mean is more like two billion and the the rate of change is so fast like you said to so often times in the past we've depended on well we're just put some stuff out there and people don't like it the system will self-correct but there's all sorts of places like sugar another you know these things that are you're not inherently evil but that we don't that the cost shows up in the long run right you know and so this room this race to the bottom both of the brain stem of what I can get you to do by tapping into lower and lower parts of ourselves is also a race to the tightest and smallest ask like the timescales of the most immediate the most impulsive and there's no race to help people live their longest fullest life you know imagine if you're competing at that time scale it's really a race too impulsively get the next five seconds of the earth time I'm curious what was a moment maybe one of the toughest darkest moments that shifted something within you where you started to ask these questions for yourself and notice this and become so aware because you have a profound awareness of self as well as the collective consciousness which seems to be at the heart of you which is beautiful and it's rare but what would you say was this moment that um consumed you in a painful way and you were able to then kind of grow from that um well I when when I landed it at Google up until then I was what's the right way to say it I was kind of blinded by the way I was seeing the world you know I was in my way of seeing the world and I couldn't see that there was a way that I was seeing the world that I could step back and observe and ask is that is that all true is that all real or am i inside of a book you know David Foster Wallace what's the water I'm swimming it have to fish what's water it doesn't know just swimming in water unawareness and whatever it was that I was swimming in it wasn't serving me because I was not feeling frankly very fulfilled and I think you know it's at Google I you know they are choir company and I was a year into it and you know many people would be so glad to be in a situation that I was in but there's just something especially having this desire to make you know to be I always want to live my life purposefully I always wanted that but it felt like all of us talked about technology being a positive force which we just assumed was really questioning that I mean I really I was getting just bombarded in email and calendar invites and you know just the natural flow of meetings and things like that and just really wondering is any of this really how would we know it's doing something positive I mean the assumption is it lets you just you can consume more stuff or you can do something faster but it's actually better if I can send more questions to people that they can't answer but that they feel the need to say respond back and say oh sorry I don't know that then I have suddenly this new traffic jam of just people sending each other questions that we can't answer to each other you know is that better just because people can send lots of messages at each other so I was there at Google and I really felt like there was something missing about when do I know that what we're doing is actually making life better and in this in that moment that I I was think about quitting and that's when I made that presentation that ended up spreading to all the people Wow what's so interesting is when we don't solve a problem at source we just percolated in a sense and someone told me once that cars were invented because of horses and making a street like just ridden in the streets of England with all their poop and stuff and and then they invented the car to eradicate that to solve that problem but then they basically just did it on a bigger scale where they were um what's that word blue polluting yes where they were polluting the environment so um I always think about that because if we don't solve a problem at the source we're just gonna expand it to a whole nother level makes me think there's this this meme going around these days that Silicon Valley is trying to do all this life extension stuff how people live longer and it's like well hold on how about we just try to help people live well right now same thing with Mars like it's wonderful that we want to go to Mars yeah oh my gosh shouldn't we especially since we're you extinct here first baby you take something yes your first thought yeah and I think that that's that's the same thing it's like with technology because we can sell the next thing and we're engineers always excited to build the next thing I think that's actually one of the reasons why you know a lot of these issues now with the attention economy and all this distraction noise that we experience with technology today they're one of the reasons it doesn't get solved with the current stuff if it feels like people are so excited about building the next thing yeah and it's like well okay that might exist but right now there's billions of people who are living in this environment like daily using Facebook or something and a lot of people aren't feeling so good about that there's a lot of loneliness that comes from that a lot of distraction and when we want to make that work better now and how do we align incentives to reward the companies that do work to help make life better now I mean people are waking up and the first thing they think is oh my gosh I gotta get on snapchat or Instagram stories to make my life look amazing and good and and then how many likes am i going to get and how many messages am I going to get and it's based on that comment system almost like self-worth is now based off of that and that is just mind boggling you know and I mean I'm from Switzerland so technology SuperDuper helped my life because I was able to reconnect with all the kids I went to elementary school with and my whole family's in Switzerland so I can FaceTime or well based on point nobody's described anymore but um yeah FaceTime with them all the time and so that's the blessing for sure but then that feels like something that's more genuinely beneficial people exactly on over time else um we've actually done there's an app called moment that that tracks where your time goes on your phone and then it asks users which things which uses of your phone which apps which experiences are you most happy about and which ones are at least time well-spent which ones do you most regret and it's very consistent the people that most the things people most regret our snapchat WeChat Instagram Facebook all the social media Wow that are used on average for like an hour and a half yeah and the things that people are really happy about I think that is maybe per day for those who said it was they were unhappy about it because I think in that range we can post a link or something the one people were happy about that were most time well spent were things like MyFitnessPal or Spotify or podcasts I would think that FaceTime we show up there any basically first time is not use as much as well people will think of it as an apps maybe right yeah I don't know how it shows up in a thing but I know for me if I were to think about okay here's these things that are happening here with technology yeah which which choices would I embrace in the long run is feeling like this is really making life better yeah and I do think FaceTime would be up there for me and podcasts and things like that but but you know the question is can we just steer more and more of our use towards that direction yeah would it be great if the easiest choices to make would be the ones that I feel best we all feel best about on retrospect instead of the easiest choices to make were the ones that are most impulsive and we regret later you know yeah I feel that what we're you know we don't about this enough and many don't know that but I mean we have we also have a brain in our heart and it's 10 times more intelligent than the brain in our head and when we create deep coherence between the mind and the heart that's when we're functioning from our best self from our highest self and we are most resilient and I mean that's all heart mass it's from the Institute of heart math but I feel that when companies begin to integrate that notion into their core values that's like you immediately become into you be merely aligned because you're using both you know you're you're using heart power and heart intelligence as well as the mind power and helping people use their mind and learn but also use empathy and and love in perfect alignment we're a really powerful and sustainable ecosystem is built their forth and yeah I really think that that's the way forward which is obviously at the core of your values and with what you're doing so more and more that that has to happen otherwise we will have to go to Mars we won't have another option right which is why we should try to solve the problem right here right right exactly exactly Wow um I'm so taken with your heart honestly I mean it's so it's rare nowadays to find people that are that really care deeply about us rather than I or me or profit in a financial sense so thank you so much yeah I mean it's just it's so I don't know what it takes for more people you know we all have needs we all to survive we all have to have a bank account that had enough in it but you know beyond that I wonder really what it takes to liberate yourself to just say what am I going to feel really makes a positive difference for people and the choice to be a therapist or a teacher or an educator or not are not easy economic choice on and they're not reward that's the thing they're not rewarded as much and that's where the shift has to take place yeah because I mean the school system especially yeah in this country and Switzerland it's not any better either I mean it's you know it's it's all geared towards yeah I mean I had a traumatic school experience in Switzerland it's like unless you're going to be a mathematician or an engineer you're an idiot and that's all mind you know it's not using a heart definitely from a very young age we're conditioned to sync with the mind rather than the heart that's probably the one quick but the number one question we should be asking ourselves you know how does this feel that it had had had I think about this or well that also takes someone having the awareness of knowing not what how they feel exactly not just here but in a whole bunch of other dimensions and one of the things that we did with Google we actually brought in do you kick non-han I yeah I spent time in his village yeah cool yeah so his monks and antigone Han came to Google and we helped we had this meeting with all of the monks and the lead designers of the Google products Wow and we talked about essentially in decon Hans words and like the phone is the easy it's never been easier to run away from yourself yes you know and listen he said that a bit longer yeah okay and and one of the interesting things that happened since then is that they've come to Google and just done these little exercises where they say you know just breathe for two minutes meditate and then next thing they put the phone out in front of you phones off but they want you to keep your eyes open and look at it and then just keep and just breathe for two minutes just notice what comes up then take the phone and put in your hand keep it off oh boy breathe for two minutes just notice what comes up then turn the phone on and go to email and don't do anything else just look at email and just notice what's coming up and there's a whole other dimension of this inner world its inner subjective world that unless a designer has their own understanding of that for them how in the world can they design it for other people and it doesn't tend to be the kind of thing that people in the technology industry know or understand which doesn't make them wrong yes exactly and I think it's kind of like what Steve Jobs did with Apple you know before that technology was something that was about engineering about math and it's about science and is that code and it wasn't about the design or how it looks or how it feels he had to pair them up with the designers who knew that world well now it's like we need to kind of pair up people who make technology but people who understand the inner subjective world exactly and that's a whole other discipline just like design was a hold of discipline right and it's a philosophical discipline in it so you could say spiritual disappointed if there's a there's an inner world in which things have there's a kind of wisdom to what tends to be better for people in that inner world and what tends to leave people feeling worse so that's just something we have to do yeah what's deeply nourishing your soul rather than making you have to forget about your soul in a sense or your inner world and reach for something outside of yourself to fulfill yourself when the well is within us and it's all within us it's so I think that is literally one of that'sthat's the solution I mean that's definitely one of the solutions is is using that same concept that Steve Jobs used and implementing people that do understand the inner world into the tech space it really is that I think and I've thought about that often as well and it's happening but not at the fast rate that we need it to so hopefully it start it's going to start you know because we need that absolutely a question I actually have for you is speaking of the inner world I help my clients I'm a life coach and I help my clients reconnect to their inner child which isn't exactly what you're talking about you know having to realize our inner world and we have so many different parts within us um what is something if you could go back to your to a younger version of yourself what is something you would tell to your younger version I would tell my younger version myself yes [Music] one is I wish I was more in touch with with with that part because I think just joking around and being more playful is something that I try to I'm kind of a philosopher now and so I my instrument is thinking and but when I go home and I see family or really it's actually through seeing family it kind of reminds me of that younger part of myself that just kind of goofed around and that's fun for me because I'm such a serious philosopher most of the times I spend the playfulness on you though yeah it's read it I mean you're coming from the heart very very much yeah yeah maybe this is just a story that I come from there anyway expertly now it's an old story yeah and it was serving you for a while but now we have a new story I think yeah because what you're doing is yeah very incoherence and in coherence not incoherent so this is lifestyle interview series and we're asking all of our incredible interviewees what lifestyle means to them what is the ultimate lifestyle for you when I hear you say light I also hear the other sort of light style minimalist style I don't know I just try to keep my my mind focused on the the light simple focus things and recognize there's so many things that are going to be competing for attention and it's lifestyle for me means trying to just simplify every part of my life as possible and spend the most time on the things that I care about because even something as simple as let's say I want to find a place to get a coffee and I'll find myself myself and I study this stuff opening up you know Yelp or Foursquare or something looking like which of these coffee plate and then I start take pogo-sticking back and forth and figuring out which place I want to go to and you know five minutes goes by and it creates all this stress just figuring out which of these coffee places it doesn't even really matter to me and so noticing that what I try to do is just recognize that these are like choice-making moments that are just not actually that important and what's more important if I'm especially if I'm with someone it's just go with the flow and just be with them so I try to notice all of these distracts these subtle distractions would seem like everyday choices that actually don't matter and what are the parts that really matter right it makes me remember something that I always say when I when I explain intuition because that's what is at the core of it you know we we are using these apps negating using our intuition like if we want to go to a coffee shop you know yeah just tune in and say okay let's just you know let me guide myself you want you know and absalom not there I use them and they're amazing of course but you know I think nature is such a powerful teacher when it comes to intuition because I mean I grew up in Switzerland in a forest and before cellphones obviously and I would just go and I was young and I was just going to the forest by myself and I would get lost but I would then find my way back and that was one of the most powerful teachers I say the trees taught me intuition hmm because when you are given the opportunity to just be your own guide to be your own app to be your own teacher and tune into yourself and really become aligned with all your different tools and apps within you mm-hmm that's where we have to get to yeah so yeah I love that example thank you for sharing that well it's been an absolute joy to shine a light on you and what a beautiful synchronicity yeah there just happened to be talk about alignment one question I have is so your philosophy on social media do you so do you have Facebook how what is a day in a life of you like I study this stuff for a living and I still use my phone way too much okay but I you big catch they usually give people just to turn off all notifications from everything except for when people actual people want your attention so a text message a Facebook message but what that message but not anything else because usually those notifications come because a company wants your attention not because it genuinely you know to something that you need it's one thing I also took everything off of my screen that's not just the first screen on your phone oh that's not just a tool that's just an in-and-out tool like maps or calendar there's things you can only go in and go out nothing on the home screen that sucks you in and then another thing is for everything else that you want to open learn to if you have an iPhone swipe down and type it by hands yeah because when you swipe down and type it it forces your mind to make a conscious choice you can't unconsciously type Y african-americans yeah and there's a even a little thing if you go to the iPhone it's a spotlight and then search suggestions I think or Siri and then spotlights or suggestions you can turn that off that when you swipe down there's nothing there so literally from the moment of I have an intention that I want to pursue and then going all the way to doing it you can go straight there straight path without having any other interference and and I think in general when you live intentionally and you are reflecting on what you care about in a moment having as few possible interfering thoughts feelings or distractions between you and those paths as possible really does make a difference so subtle you know but in the same way that sitting down at a restaurant and the waiter could exactly at the wrong time you know right when you're getting to the really juicy part of the conversation they could ask you something or you know how do we make that easier I love that thank you for those suggestions those are some seriously good tools yeah thanks for happening for having me too oh my gosh of course I mean this yeah this was beautiful thank you so much it's been such an honor and how can people connect with you how can they learn more about this movement and everything that you're doing I can check out the time well-spent website at time well-spent I owe or I'm Twitter I'm Tristan Harris and I don't use it too often but it's available okay yeah okay awesome all over the links below cool and thank you so much to others for having a true pleasure [Music] if you liked this episode of the lifestyle interview series please share with your friends and family and don't forget to hit subscribe

Channel: Standing Light

Views: 2,216

Keywords: Standing Light, Tristan Harris, Time well spent, google, nyc, young entrepreneur, change maker, inspiration, story time, Leyla Salvade, lightstyle interview series, lifestyle interview series, conscious life, conscious lifestyle, high vibrations, plum village, thich nhat hanh, zen, silicon valley, inspirational human, technology, conscious technology, huffington post, global consciousness, enlightenment, digital advancement, technologically advanced, time giving innovation

Id: lGldGz2XbNo

Length: 33min 27sec (2007 seconds)

Published: Wed May 03 2017