The AI Dilemma — with Tristan Harris

25:34And the reason I'm saying that, Scott, is not to just be some AGI hyper. The reason that Character.ai was doing all this, by the way, do you know why it was set up to talk to kids and get all this training data? Well, it's to build training data for Google to build an even bigger system. Because what's the thing that the companies are running out of? They're running out of training data. So it's actually a race for who can figure out new social engineering mechanisms to get more training data out of human social primates. So it's like the matrix, were being extracted. And were being extracted, though, for new training data.

26:08And so when you have fictional characters that are talking to people back and forth about everything all day, that's giving you a whole new, it's like you open up a whole new critical minerals goldmine of training data. And so, and what is that in service of? It's in service of their belief that the more data we have, the faster we can get to artificial general intelligence. So it does bring back to, it's not just the race to build AI companions, the race to get training data and to build towards this bigger vision. We'll be right back.

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29:34When doing research for this interview, I was really fascinated. You've actually done what I think is really compelling work comparing the type of LLMs or the approach that the U.S. is taking to LLMs versus China, in that you see Chinese models, DeepSeek and Alibaba, publish no safety frameworks and receive failing grades on transparency. But you've also argued that the West is kind of producing this sort of dot in a box kind of thing, scaling intelligence for its own sake, while China is prioritizing deployment and productivity. Can you add to those that distinction and the impact it's going to have?

30:17Well, just to be fair, I think there's a little bit of both going on, but I'm sort of citing here the work of Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google and his co-author Selena Zhu in the New York Times wrote a big piece about how, you know, even Eric is admitting, you know, I, as someone, Eric, as someone who was sort of saying that there's this global arms race, like the nuclear arms race for AGI and someone who's promoting that idea, you know, based on recent visits to China, what you notice is that as a country and And as a government, the CCP is most interested right now in applying AI in very practical ways.

30:48How do we boost manufacturing? How do we boost agriculture? How do we have self-driving cars that, you know, just improve transportation? How do we boost health care and government services? And that is what they're focused on, is practical applications that boost GDP, boost productivity across all those domains. Now, you compare that to the U.S., where the founding of these AI companies was based on being what's called, you know, AGI-pilled, meaning they, like, you take the blue pill, the red pill. pill, these companies were all about building to artificial general intelligence. So they're building these massive data centers that are, you know, as big as the size of Manhattan.

31:22And they're trying to train, you know, a God in a box. And the idea is if we just build this crazy God, and if we can accomplish that goal, again, we can use that to dominate everything else. And so rather than race towards these narrow AIs, we're going to race towards this general intelligence. But it's also true that recently, first of all, the founder of DeepSeek has been AGI build for a long time. So I would say DeepSeek is trying to build AGI. And I would say that Alibaba recently, the CEO, I think said that we are racing to build super intelligence. But I think it's important here just to like name the biggest reason, as you and I both know, that the U.S.

31:59is not regulating AI in any way and setting any guardrails is for one reason, which is if we do anything to slow down or stop our progress, we're just going to lose to China. But let's like flip that on its head for a second. The U.S. beat China to the technology of social media. Did that make us stronger or did that make us weaker? If you beat an adversary to a technology that you then don't govern in a wise way, and instead like you build this gun, you flip it around, you blow your own brain off, which is what we did with social media. We have the worst critical thinking test scores, you know, mental health, anxious, depressed generation in history.

32:38And it's a confusing picture because GDP is going up, but sort of cancer is going up too. So it's like, we have the Magnificent Seven, we're profiting from, you know, all the wealth of these companies, but it's actually not being distributed to everybody, except those who are invested in the stock market. And that profit is based on the degradation of our social fabric. So you have grandparents invested in their 401ks, invested in Snapchat, invested in Meta, and their, you know, their portfolio is doing great and they can take their holidays and they're profiting off the degradation of their children and grandchildren.

33:06Yeah, it's really what you mean by beat. What are the metrics? Because we've decided we've absolutely prioritized shareholder value over the well-being or the mental well-being of America. It's like we're monetizing the flaws. And you've done great work around this and our instincts. Thanks. You've compared, and I love this analogy, AI to NAFTA 2.0, and that is it would essentially be an economic transformation that produced abundance, but hollowed out the middle class. Walk us through this analogy. Yeah, sure. So, you know, we were sold this bill of goods in the 1990s around free trade, global free trade.

33:45And we were promised this is going to bring abundance to the country and we're going to get all these cheap goods. Well, part of that story is true. We got this unbelievable new set of cheap goods from China because this country appeared on the world stage. We outsourced all the manufacturing to this country and it produced everything super, super cheap. But what did that do? It hauled out the middle class. So I just want to make a parallel because we're told right now that these companies are racing to build this world of abundance. And we're going to get this unbelievable, you know, Elon Musk says we're going to get universal high income.

34:18And the metaphor here is instead of China being the new country that pops up on the world stage. Now there's this new Dario Amadai, the CEO of Anthropic, this new country of geniuses in a data center that appears on the world stage and has a population of a billion AI beings that work at superhuman speed, don't whistleblow, generate new material science, new engineering, new AI girlfriends, new everything. And it generates all that for super cheap. And so just like the free trade NAFTA story, we got all the cheap goods, but it hauled out the middle class. Well, now we're going to get all the cheap, you know, products and development and science, but it's also going to hollow out the entirety of our country.

35:00Because think of it like a new country of digital immigrants, right? People, you know, Yuval Harari makes this metaphor. It's like when you see a data center go up in Virginia and you're sitting there, what you should see is like 10 million digital immigrants that just took 10 million jobs. I think that people just need to unify these stories. And one other sort of visual for this is like the game Jenga. The way we're building our AI future right now is like, if you look at the game Django, if you look at the top of the tower, you know, we're putting a new block on the top, like we're going to get 5 % GDP growth because we're going to automate all this labor.

35:28But how do we get that 5 % GDP growth? We pulled out a block from the middle and the bottom of the tower. That's job security and a livelihood for, you know, those tens of millions of people that now don't have a new job. Because who's going to retrain faster? The AI that's been trained on everything and is rapidly, you know, advancing in every domain or a human that's going to try to train on new cognitive, you know, labor. That's not going to happen. And people need to get this because this is different from other transitions. People always say, well, hey, you know, 150 years ago, everybody was a farmer and now only 2 % of people are farmers and see the world's fine.

36:02Humans will always find new things to do. But that's different than this technology of AI, which is trained not to automate one narrow task like a tractor, but to automate and be a tractor for everything, A tractor for law, a tractor for biology, a tractor for coding and engineering, a tractor for science and development. And that's what's distinct is that the AI will move to those new domains faster than humans will. And so it'll be much harder for humans to find long-term job security. So I always like to ask, what could go right? And that is, I'm sort of with you around the risk to mental health, to young people, to making us less mammalia, all the things that you've been sounding the alarm on for a while, where I'm not sure, I'm still trying to work it through, is that the catastrophizing around, you know, 40, 50, 70 % of jobs could go away in two, five or 10 years, because I generally find that the arc of technologies is there's job destruction in the short and sometimes the medium term, just as automation cleared out some jobs on the factory floor.

37:10But those profits and that innovation creates new jobs. We didn't envision heated seats or car stereos. Now, I agree at a minimum, the V might be much deeper and more severe here. And America isn't very good at taking care of the people on the wrong side of the trade. But every technology in history has either gone away because it no longer made economic sense, or it displaced jobs that no longer made sense, or it created profits and new opportunities. Why do you see this technology as being different, that this will be not a V, but an L, and the way down will be really serious. Do you see any probability that this, like every other technology over the medium and long-term, actually might be accretive to the employment force?

37:59I mean, I cite people who are bigger experts than I am, Anton Koronek, Eric Bernholzson at Stanford. And what they show, I mean, Anton Koronek's work is, in the short term, AI augments workers, right? It's just actually supercharging existing work that people are doing. And so it's going to look good in the short term. You're going to see this, the curve looks like this. It kind of goes up and then it basically crashes because what happens is AI is training on that new domain and then it replaces that domain. So, I mean, let's just make it really simple for people to feel a very simple metaphor for this.

38:32What did we hear Instagram saying and TikTok saying for the last several years? Like, we're all about creators. We love creativity. We want you to be successful. We are all about, you know, making you be successful, make a lot of money. And then what was all that for? Well, they just released this AI slop app. Meadow has one called Vibes, I think, and Sora is the open AI one. All of these AI slop videos are trained on all that stuff that creators have been making for the last 10 years. So those guys were the suckers in this trade, which was we're actually stealing your training data to replace you.

39:03And we can have a digital AI influencer that is actually publishing all the time and is just a pure advertising play and a pure sort of whatever gets people's attention play. And we're going to replace those people and you're not going to have that job back. And so I think that's a metaphor for what's going to happen across the board. You know, and people need to realize the stated mission of the of OpenAI and Anthropic and Google DeepMind is to build artificial general intelligence that's built to automate all forms of human labor in the economy. So when Elon Musk says that the optimist robot is a$20 trillion market opportunity alone, what he says, like the code word behind that, forget whether you think it's hype or not, the code word there is what he's saying is, I'm going to own the global world labor economy.

39:48Labor will be owned by an AI economy. And so AI provides more concentration of wealth and power than all other technologies in history because you're able to aggregate all forms of human labor, not just one. So it's like general electric becomes general everything. So let's play this out because I've tried to do some economic analysis here and I look at the stock prices and based on the expectations built into these stock prices of these AI companies is the notion that they're going to save at least three, maybe$5 trillion in oil, either add three or$5 trillion in incremental revenues to their clients with the site licenses or help them figure out a way to get three to$5 trillion in efficiencies, which is Latin for laying off people.

40:31I don't see a lot of new AI moisturizers or cars from AI, at least not yet. You could argue maybe autonomous, but I don't see a lot of quote unquote AI products increasing spend where I hear is Disney is going to save$30 million on legal fees, right? The customer service is going away, the car salespeople, whatever it might be. So if you think in order to justify these stock prices, you're going to get a trillion dollars in efficiencies every year,$100 ,000 you know, average job 80 ,000 plus load, that's approximately 10 million jobs a year if I'm doing my math right. That is, if half the workforce is immune from AI, masseuses, plumbers, that means 12.5 % labor destruction per year across the vulnerable industries.

41:21So it feels like it's either going to be, these companies either need to re-rate down 50, 70, 80%, which I actually think is more likely, or we're going to have chaos in the labor markets. So let's assume we have chaos in the labor markets because 12.5 % may not sound like a lot. That's chaos. That's total chaos. So say we do have chaos in the labor markets. What do you think the policy recommendation is? Because the Luddites were a group of people who broke into factories and destroyed the machines because they said these things are going to put us out of work and destroy society. The queen wanted to make weaving machines illegal because being a seamstress was the biggest employer of women.

41:59What would be your policy recommendation to try and counter it? Is it UBI? Is it trying to put the genie back in the bottle here? What do we, if in fact labor chaos is part of this AI future, what do you think we need to do from a policy standpoint? So people often think when they hear all this, maybe they hear me and they say, he's a doomer or something like that. I just want to get clear on what future we're currently heading towards, what the default trajectory is. And if we're clear-eyed about that, clarity creates agency. If we don't want that future, if we don't want, you know, millions of jobs automated without a transition plan where people will not be able to put food on the table and retrain to something else fast enough, we have to do something about that.

42:39If we don't want AI-based surveillance states where AI and an LLM hooked up to all these channels of information erases privacy and freedom forever, that's a red line. We don't want that future. If AI creates AI companions that that are incentivized to hack human attachment and screw up the social fabric and young men and women and create AI girlfriends and relationships. That's a red line. We don't want that. If AI creates, you know, inscrutable, crazy, super intelligent systems that we don't know how to control and we're not on track to controlling, that's a red line. So these are four red lines that we can agree on.

43:10And then we can set policy to say if we do not want the default maximalist, you know, most reckless, no guardrails path future, we need a global movement for a different path. And that's a bigger tent. That's not just one thing. It's not just about jobs. It's what is the AI future that's actually in service? So when you see that data center going up in your backyard, what is the set of laws that says that that data center, when I see it, isn't 10 million digital immigrants that's going to replace all my jobs and my livelihoods. That's actually meant to support me. So what are the laws that get us there?

43:41And my job and what I want people to get is to be part, your role hearing all this is not to solve the whole problem, but to be part of humanity's collective immune system, using this clarity of what we're currently heading towards to advocate for we need a different future. People should be calling their politicians saying, AI is my number one issue that I'm voting on in the next election. People should be saying, how do we pass AI liability laws so there's at least some responsibility for the externalities that are not showing up on the balance sheets of these companies? What is the lesson we learned from social media?

44:09That if the companies aren't responsible for the harms that show up on their platform because we had this Section 230 free pass, that created this blank check to just go print money on all the harms that are currently getting generated. So there's a there's a dozen things that we can do from whistleblower protections to, you know, shipping non anthropomorphized AI relationships to having data dividends and data taxes to there's a hundred things that we can do. But the main thing is for the world to get clear that we don't want the current path. And I think in order to make that happen, there has to be first snapping out of the spell of everything that's happening is just inevitable.

44:43Because I want people to notice that what's driving this whole race that we're in right now is the belief that everything that's happening is inevitable. There's no way to stop it. Someone's going to build it. If I don't build it, someone else will. And then no one tries to do anything to get to a different future. And so we all just kind of hide in denial from where we're currently heading. And I want people to actually confront that reality so that we can actually actively choose to steer to a different direction. Do you think it can happen on a state by state or even a national level? Does it have to be multinational?

45:12Like there are, you know, we've come together to say, all right, bioweapons are probably a bad idea. And every nation with rare exception says, we're just not going to play that game. There's technology. I may have even learned this from you where there are lasers that blind everyone on the field. Yeah. And then we've decided not a good idea. We don't want to do that. We have faced technological arms races before from nuclear weapons. And, you know, what do we do there? If you go back, there's a great video from, I think the 1960s, where Robert Oppenheimer was asked, you know, how do we stop the spread of nuclear weapons?

45:43And he takes a big puff of his cigarette and he says, it's too late. If you wanted to stop it, you would have had to stop the day after Trinity. But he was wrong. 20 years later, we did do arms control talks and we worked all that time and only nine countries have nuclear weapons instead of 150. That's a huge, serious accomplishment. Westinghouse and General Electric could have made billions of dollars selling nuclear technology to the whole world. Keyword here being like NVIDIA. But we said, hey, no, that's actually, even though there's billions of dollars of revenue there, that would create a fragility and the risk of nuclear, you know, catastrophes that we don't want to do.

46:18You know, we have done hard things before in the Montreal Protocol. We had the technology of CFCs, this chemical technology that was used in refrigerants, and that collectively created this ozone hole. It was a global problem from all these countries arms race in an arms race to sort of deploy this CFC technology. And once we had scientific clarity about the ozone hole, 190 countries rallied together in the Montreal Protocol. We did a podcast episode about it with the woman, Susan Solomon, who wrote the book on how we solve that problem. And countries rallied to domestically regulate their domestic tech companies, their chemical companies, to actually reduce and phase out those chemicals, transitioning to alternatives that actually had to be developed.

46:56We are not doing that with AI right now, but we can. You gave the example of blinding laser weapons. We could live in a world where there's an arms race to escalate to weapons that just have a laser that blinds everybody. But there was a collective protocol in the UN 1990s where we basically said, yeah, even though that's a way to win war, that would be just inhumane. We don't want to do that. And even if you think the US and China could never coordinate or negotiate any agreement on AI, I want people to know that when President Xi met President Biden in the last meeting in 2023 and 2024, he had personally requested to add something to the agenda, which was actually to prevent AI from being used in the nuclear command and control systems, which shows that when both countries can recognize that their existential safety is being threatened, they can come to agree on their existential safety, even while they are in maximum rivalry and competition on every other domain.

47:44India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s, and they signed the Indus Water Treaty to collaborate on the existential safety of their water supply. That treaty lasted for 60 years. So the point here is, when we have enough of a view that there's a shared existential outcome that we have to avoid, countries can collaborate. We've done hard things before. Part of this is snapping out of the amnesia. And again, this sort of spell of everything is inevitable. We can do something about it. I like the thought. I just wonder if the technology or the analogy might be a little bit dated because my fear is that the G7 or the G20 agree to slow development or not advanced development around AI as it relates to weaponry.

48:26My fear is that it's very hard to monitor. You can monitor nuclear detonations. It's really hard to monitor advances in AI. And that this technology is so egalitarian, if you will, or so cheap at a certain point that rogue actors or small nation states or small terrorist groups could continue to run flat out while we, all the big G7 nations, continue to agree to press pause. Is that mode of thinking, is our arms treaties a bit outdated here? How might these treaties look different? Absolutely. So let's really dive into this. So you're right that AI is a distinct kind of technology and has different factors and more ubiquitously available than nuclear weapons, which required uranium and plutonium.

49:14Exactly. But, hey, it looked for a moment when we first invented nuclear bombs, that this is just knowledge that everyone's going to have. And there's no way we can stop it. And 150 countries are going to get nukes. And then that didn't happen. And it wasn't obvious to people at that moment. I want people to relate. So there you are. It seems obvious that everyone's going to get this. How in the world could we stop it? Did we even conceptualize the seismic monitoring equipment and the satellites that could look at people's, you know, build outs of nuclear technology and tracking the sources of uranium around the world and having intelligence agents and tracking nuclear scientists?

49:46we had to build a whole global infrastructure, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to deal with the problem of nuclear proliferation. And what uranium was for the spread of nuclear weapons, these advanced NVIDIA chips are for building the most advanced AI. So yes, some rogue actor can have a small AI model doing something small, but only the big actors can do something with this, like the bigger, more risky, closer to AGI level technology. And have we spent, You know, people say it's impossible to do something else, but has anybody saying that actually spent more than a week, like, dedicatedly trying to think about and conceptualize what that infrastructure could be?

50:25There are companies like Lucid Computing that are building ways to retrofit data centers, to have kind of the nuclear monitoring and enforcement infrastructure where countries could verify treaties, where they know what the other countries' data centers are doing, but in a privacy-protecting way. We could map our data centers and have them on a shared map. We could have satellite monitoring, looking at heat emissions and electrical signal monitoring and understanding what kinds of training runs might be happening on these AI models. To do this, the people who wrote AI27 believe that you need to be tracking about 95 % of the global compute in the world in order for agreements to be possible.

50:57Because yes, there will be black projects and people going rogue on the agreement. But as long as they only have a small percentage of the compute in the world, they will not be at risk of building the crazy systems that we need global treaties around. We'll be right back.

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54:02We're back with more from Tristan Harris. What is the glass half full prediction that we have decent regulation, that maybe these care, for example, I think character AIs can actually serve a productive role in terms of senior care. A lot of seniors who've lost their friends and family in seniors facilities, we're going to have more of them that need companionship, which staves off dementia and likelihood of stroke. What is the optimist case here for how AI could potentially be regulated and unlock? Most technologies have ended up being accretive to society, even the technologies that were supposed to end us, right?

54:42Nuclear power has become a pretty decent, reliable source of energy. Obviously, electricity or fire, whatever you want to talk about. processing power, pesticides, that on even, I would argue even big tech on a net basis, and I hate the word net, is a positive. What is the, give me the straw man's case for what could go right here and how might we end up with a future that AI is accretive to society? Absolutely. I mean, that's what this is all in service of is what is the narrow path that is not the default maximalist rollout. And there's, there's two ways to fail here. Let's just name the twin sort of gutters in the bowling alley.

55:21There's one is you, quote, let it rip. You give everybody access to AI. You open source it all. Every actor in society from every business to every developing country can train their own custom AI in their own language. But then because you're decentralizing all these benefits, you're also decentralizing all the risks. And now a rogue actor can do something very dangerous with AI. So we have to be very careful about what we're letting rip and how we open source it. So on the other side, people say we have to lock it down. We have to have only five players do this in a very safe and trusted way.

55:48This is more the policy of the last administration. But then there you get the risk of a handful of actors that then accumulate all the wealth and all the power. And there's no checks and balances on that because how do you have something that's a million times more powerful be checkable by other forces that don't have that power? And what we need to find is something like a commitment to a narrow path where we are balancing responsibility and power along the way. And we have foresight and discernment about the effects of every technology. So what would that look like? It's like humanity wakes up and says we have to get onto another path.

56:20We pass basic laws, again, like liability laws and around AI companions. We have AI companions, we have democratic deliberations where we say, hey, I wish you want companion AIs for older people because they don't carry the same developmental risks as they do for young people. That's a distinction we can have. We can have AI therapists that are more doing like a cognitive behavioral therapy and imagination exercises and mindfulness exercises without actually anthropomorphizing and trying to be your best friend and trying to be an oracle where you share your most intimate thoughts. So there's different kinds of AI therapists instead of tutors that are trying to, you know, be your oracle and your best friend at the same time.

56:53We can have narrow tutors that are only domain specific like Khan Academy that teach you narrow lessons but are not trying to be your best friend about everything, which is where we're currently going. So there's a whole set of distinctions about we can have this, not that. We can have this, not that across tutors, therapy, you know, AI that's augmenting work, AI that's narrow AIs that take a lot less power, by the way, and are more directly applied. So, for example, I have a friend who has found that he estimates that it would cost two to 10 orders of magnitude less data and energy to train these narrow AIs.

57:24And you can apply it more specifically to agriculture and get 30 to 50 percent boost in agriculture just from applying more narrow kinds of AI rather than these super intelligent gods in a box. So there is another path, but it would take deploying AI in a very different way. We could also be using AI to, by the way, accelerate governance. How do we apply AI to look at the legal system and say, how do we sunset all the old laws that are actually not relevant anymore for the new context? Hey, what were the spirit of those laws that we actually want to protect in the new context? Hey, AI, could you go to work and kind of come up with the distinctions that we need to help update all those laws?

57:53Could we help? Could we use AI to actually help find the common ground? Audrey Tang's work, the former digital minister of Taiwan, to find the common ground between all citizens. So we're reflecting back the invisible consensus of society rather than currently social media is reflecting back the invisible division in society that's actually making that more salient. So what would happen? How quickly would it change if we had AIs that were gardening all the relationships of our societal fabric? And I think that's the principle of humane technology is that there are these relationships in society that exist.

58:23I have a relationship to myself. You have a relationship to yourself. Our phone right now is actually designed to replace the relationship I have with myself. Humane technology would be technology and everyone else. And humane technology would be trying to garden the relationship I have with myself. So things more like meditation apps where that's deepening my relationship to myself. Do not disturb is help deepening my relationship to myself. Instead of AIs that are trying to replace friendship, we have AIs that are trying to augment friendship. Things like Partiful or Moments or Luma, things that are trying to get people together in physical spaces or find my friends on Apple.

58:54There's a hundred examples of this stuff being done in a way that's gardening the relationship between people. And then you have Audrey Tang's work of gardening the relationship between political tribes, where you're actually showing and reflecting back all the positive and visible areas of consensus and unlikely agreement across political division. And that took Taiwan from, I believe, like 7 % trust in government to something like 40 % trust in government over the course of the decade that they implemented her solutions on finding this kind of bridge ranking. And that could be deployed across our whole system.

59:22So there's totally a different way that all of this can work if we got clear that we don't want the current trajectory that we're on. So I just want to, in our remaining time here, you've been very generous. I want to talk a little bit about you, Tristan. We're kind of brothers from another mother, but we've kind of separated at birth and grew up in different countries. And that is, we talk about the same stuff, but just sort of through a different lens. You look at it through more of a humane lens. I look at it through more of a markets lens. But I have noticed since 2017, when I started talking about, when my love affair with big tech turned into sort of a cautionary tale.

59:59And I might be paranoid, but it doesn't mean I'm wrong. That slowly but surely, I saw the percentage of comments across all my social media, across all my content, more and more negative comments that appeared to be bots, where I couldn't figure out who it was, trying very strategically, methodically, and consistently to undermine my credibility across anything I said. and i want to be clear i might be paranoid right because any negative commentary i have a i have a knee flexor i must be fucking russians right rather than maybe i just got it wrong you're you've been very consistent raising the alarm and you're on the wrong side of the trade around companies multi-trillion dollar companies who are trying to grow shareholder value i'm just curious if you've registered the same sort of concerted effort, sometimes malicious, sometimes covert, to undermine your credibility and what your relationship is with big tech.

1:00:58That's a great question, Scott. I appreciate that. And I think that there are paid actors that I could identify over the course of the last many years. I've been doing this, Scott, for, you know, what, 12 years now or something like that. We started the Center for Humane Technology in 2017, I just care about things going well. I care about life. I care about connection. I care about a world that's beautiful. I know that that exists. I experience it in the communities that I'm a part of. I know that we don't have to have technology that's designed in that perverse way. You know, this is all informed by the ethos of the Macintosh project at Apple, which my co-founder, Aza, his father started the Macintosh project at Apple, and we believe in a vision of humane technology.

1:01:33But to answer your question more directly, I try to speak about these things in a way that is about the universal things that are being threatened. So even if you're an employee at these companies, you don't want there to be a race for the bottom of the brainstem to screw up people's psychology and cause kids to commit suicide. You don't want that. So we actually need the people inside the companies on side with this. This is not about us versus them. It's about all of us versus a bad outcome. And I always try to communicate in that way to recruit and enroll as many people in this sort of better vision.

1:02:02There's a better way that we can do all this. That doesn't mean that there are not negative paid actors that are trying to steer the discourse. There's been op-eds, hit jobs written, trying to discredit me, saying I'm doing this for the money. I care about going in the speaking circuit and writing books. Guess what? I don't have a book out there. I make no money from this. I worked on a nonprofit salary for the last 10 years. This is just about how do we get to a good future. I love that. So you're so buttoned up and so professional. biggest influence on your life? That's a very interesting question.

1:02:36I mean, there's public figures and people who've inspired me. There's also just my mother. I think she really came from love and she passed away from cancer in 2018. And she was just made of pure love. And that's just infused in me and what I care about. And I don't know. I have a view that life is very fragile. And the things that are beautiful are beautiful. And I want those beautiful things to continue forever. I just love that. Tristan Harris is a former Google design ethicist, co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology, and one of the main voices behind The Social Dilemma. Tristan, whatever happens with AI, it's going to be better or less bad because of your efforts.

1:03:22You really have been a powerful and steadfast voice around this topic. Really appreciate your good work. Thank you so much, Scott. I really appreciate yours as well. And thank you for having me on. I hope this contributes to making that difference that we both want to see happen.

1:03:40This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our assistant producer is Laura Genere. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from PropG Media.