Tristan Harris (Time Well Spent) - Making Technology Less Manipulative

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Business, Life Lessons, Creativity, Startups, Strategy, Thought Leadership, Education, Stanford University, Leadership, Challenges, Journey, Culture, Etl, Innovation, Founders, Stanford, Entrepreneurship

4.5 • 740 Ratings

🗓️ 3 November 2017

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How good are you at limiting your screen time? Because of the way humans evolved, our brains are no match for the engineers, designers and companies that collectively create the devices and apps that demand our attention all day long, according to technology ethicist Tristan Harris. A former tech entrepreneur himself, Harris is now co-founder of Time Well Spent, a nonprofit movement to create an ecosystem that aligns technology with our humanity.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.3	You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.
0:18.4	On today's episode, we have Tristan Harris, the co-founder and co-director of Time Well Spent,
0:24.4	a nonprofit movement to create an ecosystem that aligns technology with our humanity.
0:30.2	Prior to Time Well Spent, Tristan was a design ethicist and product philosopher at Google,
0:35.4	where he studied how technology influences a billion
0:38.1	users' attention, well-being, and behavior. He graduated from Stanford with a BS in computer
0:43.1	science. Here's Tristan. Thank you guys all for coming. Yeah, it is very weird for me to be here.
0:52.3	I did come here as a student and listen to many famous entrepreneurs come and give lectures. I remember the first one that I came, I had a venture capitalist or it was like a real estate guy come up to me and saying, well, he gave me his business card and he said, if you ever need office space, you know, call me. And I was like, what do you mean? And he's like, well, you know, you're going to start a company someday. So when you want to, just get some
1:13.9	office space. So, yeah, my role in the world now is very different than I actually thought it
1:23.1	would be when I was at Stanford. I was, so I graduated here in 2006 as an undergrad in computer science.
1:30.1	I took mostly symbolic systems classes.
1:33.3	I was very interested in cognition, in the mind, in neuroscience, and psychology,
1:38.7	and I got particularly interested in a lab here called the Persuasive Technology Lab. Does anybody here know
1:46.9	the Persuasive Technology Lab? Some of you? Okay. If you didn't know, the Persuasive Technology
1:53.8	Lab is basically taught by BJ Fogg. He's a psychology professor, and he pioneered this field
1:59.7	of persuasive design. How do you persuade people?
2:06.9	How does that work? And how could technology persuade us for good? That was the question.
2:14.6	And this lab was filled with young engineering students, mostly computer science,
2:20.4	business, psychology students, many of whom went on to join the ranks of Facebook and actually
2:26.2	my project partner in the class, Mike Krieger, was here from Stanford and founded Instagram,
2:31.5	actually using a lot of the techniques that we designed and learned about.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Stanford eCorner, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Stanford eCorner and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.