So tomorrow you want Mark Zuckerberg to call up Jack Dorsey, and you want the CEOs of all these companies to get together and say, “OK, we’re going to tell our engineers that they need to think about what’s best for their users, and we need to make a pact among ourselves that we’re going to do XYZ”?

That’s one part of it. And that touches on all sorts of problems having to do with colluding and self-policing and a whole bunch of other things. But we need to have a conversation about the misalignment between the business model and what is best for people; we need a deep and honest conversation among the companies about where these harms are emerging and what it would take to get off the advertising train. And I’m here to help them do that.

Talk to me a little bit about the differences between some of the companies. Apple, Google, Facebook—they have infinite sums of money. If they wanted to change their policies, that would be fine. Twitter—

Twitter not so much, but Apple and Facebook and Google could, yeah.

So you can imagine some kind of agreement between the infinitely profitable companies, but then Twitter, Snapchat, and the other companies not having the same financial success presumably wouldn’t join the pact.

Exactly, and that’s why it gets more complicated, because you can’t control, for example, popular companies that are outside the US. What do you do when Weibo swoops in and takes all the attention that Apple and Facebook and Google left on the table when they did their self-policing agreement? That's why it has to be coordinated from the outside.

There are two ways that can happen: One is through regulation, which is unfortunate, but something you have to look at; the other, and the opportunity here, is for Apple. Apple is the one company that could actually do it. Because their business model does not rely on attention, and they actually define the playing field on which everyone seeking our attention plays. They define the rules. If you want to say it, they’re like a government. They get to set the rules for everybody else. They set the currency of competition, which is currently attention and engagement. App stores rank things based on their success in number of downloads or how much they get used. Imagine if instead they said, “We’re going to change the currency” They could move it from the current race to the bottom to creating a race to the top for what most helps people with different parts of their lives. I think they’re in an incredible position to do that.

So you’ve partnered with this app called Moment, and one of the things it does is tell users how much time they've spent in each app, then users rate their satisfaction with each app. So Apple could presumably take that data, or create its own, and at the end of the day ask you, “How satisfied are you?” And if people are very satisfied it could put that app at the top of the App Store.

Yes. That’s one small thing that they could do. They could change the game, change what it means to win and lose in the App Store. So it would not be about who gets the most downloads.

What else could Apple do, specifically?

Change the way that they design the home screen. And notifications. They set the terms. Right now when you wake up in the morning it’s like every app is still competing all at once for your attention. Netflix and Facebook and YouTube want your attention just as much as the morning meditation apps. Imagine if there were zoning laws. So they could set up zoning lines in the attention city that they run and separate your morning from your evening from your on-the-go moments of screen time. So when you wake up, you’d see a morning home screen, in which things compete to help you wake up, which could include there being nothing on there at all. It’s like the stores are closed until 10 am, just like back in the old days. Right now, you don’t have a way to set that up. And there’s no way for there to be a marketplace of alternatives—alternative home screens or notification rules. So this is actually a way in which Apple could either do a really good job themselves or enable a marketplace of competing alternatives so that people could set up these zones, and we could figure out what would really work best for people.