“If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers somet...” — Tristan Harris Quote

If, at any moment, reality gets dull or boring, our phone offers something more pleasurable, more productive and even more educational than whatever reality gives us.

Once you start understanding that your mind can be scheduled into having little thoughts or little blocks of time that you didn't choose, wouldn't we want to use that understanding and protect against the way that that happens?

I was a design ethicist at Google, where I studied how do you ethically steer people's thoughts? Because what we don't talk about is how the handful of people working at a handful of technology companies through their choices will steer what a billion people are thinking today.

YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect.

I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull. So when I embarked into the world of picture books, my first thought was to do something about the dark.

Football is such a great game, but football players are so dull.

I used to tell really boring stories as a child, about my toy panda's nose falling off, or something equally dull.

I have a really, really, really normal family. And by normal I mean we're all nuts on some level. I think you've gotta be a little nuts to pursue any kind of creative job. I was also a really good kid. I know that sounds really dull, but I didn't rebel in the traditional sense.