Questioning What You Do

Upton Sinclair, the writer, wrote that you can't ask someone to question the thing that their salary depends on. It's even harder to get someone to question something that they deeply believe is their purpose. Think about questioning someone's religion or something like that, or questioning someone's identity. And the reason I'm talking about this is because all of us in this room, I imagine, have good intentions for where we want the world to go and what it means to value certain things that we care about. But we're only as good as the way that we can self examine our own values. So here I was at Google and I was kind of recovering as an entrepreneur. I felt honestly like I had failed. I needed to get psychotherapy. I went to Burning Man. I had to kind of let go of the life that I was living and realizing there was more to life than just starting companies. And I still had all these friends that had started companies. And then I was sitting at Google and I actually joined the Gmail team and working on some future looking, personal assistance type projects. And I was working with Gmail and I was in the room with the people who make this product. I was fascinated. Here's this Gmail product that literally, I don't know a billion people actively use and that hundreds of millions of knowledge workers. That's the window, it might be open on some of your laptop screens right now for all I know. We people live in this product and it has this extraordinary influence on the thoughts that arrive in people's heads. Right? Like just you're sitting there. If an email comes in right now, it's gonna push thoughts into your mind and you don't get to choose whether that happens. It just, it just happens. And so I was sitting in this room, you know, thinking about, you know, I really cared about products that really delivered a positive benefit in the world. And I was in the room with the people who would be thinking the most deeply about what it would mean to truly benefit people's lives. What email should do, what are the values behind email? Of all rooms to be in, in the world, to be in that design room is like, that's the room. And I was, I don't want to say disappointed, but the way that the conversations were had were about let's make it really fun to use. Let's make it engaging. What if we make it bounce up when you scroll? What if it expands vertically instead of slides horizontally? And there was all these design questions like that and I felt that there was something missing. I couldn't put my finger on it for a while. But I realized later it's like, when is email actually adding up to a real net positive difference in your life? Think about the emails that you send, whether it's love letters or apartment searches, where you're actually getting some real, actual delivered life change, a real benefit, a real value. And then think of all the other stuff that we're just kind of shuffling messages back and forth. And I felt like of all rooms to be asking this question. We were not asking the biggest question. And after a year at Google, I was kind of burnt out and I decided that I was basically going to leave. At least I thought I did. And before I did, I kind of took these concerns and I made a presentation. And the presentation was basically never before in history have 50 designers in California at three tech companies influenced what 2 billion people will think and do right now. And we have an enormous responsibility as a company that shapes this screen in terms of what we are causing people to do. And the reason I was even thinking about that is because I had this background as a magician and in the persuasive technology lab where I learned that minds really are steered by forces that they don't see. So I have to say that in making this presentation, I actually thought I was going to get fired. It was not alarmist or angry or upset, but it was very critical and it was very existential. Like what does it mean for actually email to be a benefit to people's lives? And I was surprised because I sent it to about 10 people. And when I came into work the next morning, I got some emails back and I clicked on their comments and, and I went to the presentation, Google presentations that showed the number of simultaneous viewers was 150. And when I clicked on it later that day, there was 450 simultaneous viewers. And basically I saw that it spread virally around the entire company. Went all the way up to Larry Page. He was in three different meetings that day where people brought it to his attention. And suddenly I was in this moment where I felt like the whole company was woken up to this question of are we actually influencing the world in a positive way? And that led me to the next three years. Actually an executive at Google saw this and basically generously offered to host me in a little corner in his lab in New York where I could study ethical design, which I basically self titled this role of design ethicist. And this new field of what is ethical design or ethical persuasion? What does it mean to ethically influence what 2 billion people are going to be thinking and doing.