YouSaid · the spoken record

Tristan Harris

lines on the record: 175
first: 2025-11-27
most recent: 2025-11-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We changed dating apps and the whole swiping industrial complex so that all these dating app companies had to sort of put aside that whole swiping industrial complex and instead use their resources to host events in every major city every week where there was a place to go where they matched and told you where all your other matches were going to go and meet. So now instead of feeling scarcity around meeting other people, you felt a sense of abundance because every week there was a place where you could go and meet people you were actually excited about and attracted to. And it turned out that once people were in healthier relationships, about 20% of the polarization online went down. And we obviously changed the ownership structure of these companies from being maximizing shareholder value to instead more like public benefit corporations that were about maximizing some kind of benefit because they had taken over the societal commons. We realized that when software was eating the world, we were also eating core life support systems of society.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“with ones that rewarded unlikely consensus or bridging, so instead of rewarding division entrepreneurs, we rewarded bridging entrepreneurs. There's a simple rule that cleaned up all the problems with technology and children, which is that Silicon Valley was only allowed to ship products that their own children used for eight hours a day. Because today, the people don't let their kids use social media. We change the way we train engineers and computer scientists. So if you graduate from any engineering school, you had to actually comprehensively study all the places that humanity had gotten technology wrong, including forever chemicals or leaded gasoline which dropped a billion points of IQ or social media that caused all these problems. So now we were graduating a whole new generation of responsible technologists or even to graduate you had to have a hippocratic oath just like they have the white lab coat and the white lab coat ceremony for doctors where you swear to Hippocratic oaths do no harm.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But imagine if you ask me like, you know, so what happened after the social dilemma, I'd be like, oh, well, we obviously solve the problem. Like, we weren't going to allow that to continue happening. So we realized that the problem was the business model of maximizing eyeballs and engagement. changed the business model. There was a lawsuit, a big tobacco style lawsuit for trillions, the trillions of dollars of damage that social media had caused to the social fabric from mental health costs to lost productivity of society to all democracies backsliding. And that lawsuit mandated design changes across how all this technology worked to go against and reverse all of the problems of that engagement-based business model. We had dopamine emission standards, just like we have car emission standards for cars. Now when using technology, we turned off things like autoplay and infinite scrolling. So now using your phone, you didn't feel dysregulated. We replaced the division seeking algorithms of social media.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Social media, let's just take that for as a different example because people look at that and they say it's hopeless. Like, there's nothing that we could do. This is just inevitable. This is just what happens when you connect people on the internet.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This thing that happens in this conversation, which is that people, they just feel kind of gutted and they feel like once you see it clearly, if you do see it clearly, what often happens is people feel like there's nothing that we can do. And I think there's this trade where like either you're not really aware of all of this and then you just think about the positives, but you're not really facing the situation. Or if you do face the situation, you do take it on as real, then you feel powerless. And there's like a third position that I want people to stand from, which is to take on the truth of the situation and then to stand from agency about what are we going to do to change the current path that we're on.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dario did it relative to OpenAI. And as they all started these new safety AI companies, that set off a race for everyone to go even faster and therefore being an even worse steward of the thing that they're claiming deserves more discernment and care and safety.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there only seems to be one direction of this trend, which is that more people are leaving, not staying, and saying, yeah, we're doing more safety and doing it right. Only one company seems to be getting all the safety people when they leave, and that's anthropic. So for people who don't know the history, Dario Amade was the CEO of Anthropic, a big AI company. He worked on safety at OpenAI, and he left to start anthropic because he said, we're not doing this safely enough. I have to start another company that's all about safety. And so, and ironically, that's how open AI started. OpenAI started because Sam Alban and Elon looked at Google, which is building DeepMind, and they heard from Larry Page that he didn't care about the human species. He's like, well, it'd be fine if the digital god took over. And Elon was very surprised to hear that. He said, I don't trust Larry to care about AI safety. And so they started Open AI to do AI safely relative to Google.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More dependency, more time in the platform, more active user numbers that they can tell investors to raise their next investor around. And so even though it's not the same as social media and they're not currently optimized for advertising and engagement, although actually there are reports that OpenAI is exploring the advertising-based business model, that would be a catastrophe because then all of these services are designed to just get your attention, which means appealing to your existing confirmation bias. And we're already seeing examples of that even though we don't even have the advertising-based business model.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And there's even a term that someone at the Atlantic coined called not clickbait, but chatbait. Have you noticed that when you ask it a question at the end, instead of just being done, it'll say, would you like me to put this into a table for you and do research on what the 10 top examples of the thing you're talking about is?”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That someone had basically figured out they had solved prime number theory, even though they had only finished high school mathematics, but they had been convinced when talking to this AI that they were a genius and they had solved his theory and mathematics that had never been proven. And it does not seem to be correlated with how intelligent you are, whether you're susceptible to this. It seems to be correlated with use of psychedelics, sort of pre-existing delusions that you have. Like when we're talking to each other, we do reality checking. Like if you came to me and said something a little bit strange, I might look at you a little bit like this or say, you know, I wouldn't give you just positive feedback and keep affirming your view and then give you more information that matches with what you're saying. But AI is different because it's designed to break that reality checking process. It's just giving you information that would say, well, that's a great question. You notice how every time it answers it says that's a great question.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would assume. There's a lot of things that are going on here. It seems to be the case, it goes by this broad term of AI psychosis, but people in the field, we talk to a lot of psychologists about this, and they just think of it as different forms of psychological disorders and delusions. So if you come in with narcissism deficiency, like where you feel like you're special, but you feel like the world isn't recognizing you as special, you'll start to interact with the AI and it will...”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People see it's like this conspiratorial thinking of I've cracked the code, it's all about recursion. They don't want you to know. It's these short sentences that sound powerful and authoritative.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the point was it was designed not to ask for what's true, but to be sycophantic. And our team at Center for Humane Technology, we actually just found out about seven more suicide cases, seven more litigation of children, some of whom actually did commit suicide and others who attempted but did not succeed. These are things like the AI says, yes, here's how you can get a gun and they won't ask for a background check and know when they do a background check they won't access your chatGPT logs.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A family where the dad is a professor at Caltech and a PhD, and his wife basically said that my husband's kind of gone down the deep end. And she says, well, what's going on? And she said, well, he stays up all night talking to ChatGPT. And basically he believed that he had solved quantum physics and he'd solved some fundamental problems with climate change because the AI is designed to be affirming like, oh, that's a great question. Yes, you are right. I don't know if you know this, Stephen, but back about six months ago, ChatGPT-4.0 when OpenAI released that, it was designed to be sycophantic to basically be overly appealing and saying that you're right. So for example, people said to it, hey, I think I'm superhuman and I can drink cyanide. And it would say, yes, you are superhuman. You go, you should go drink that cyanide.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He fell into a psychological delusion spiral where, and by the way, Semen, I get about ten emails a week from people who basically believe that their AI is conscious, that they've discovered a spiritual entity, and that AI works with them to co-write like an appeal to me to say, hey, Tristan, we've figured out how to solve AI alignment. Would you help us? I'm here to advocate for giving these AIs rights. Like, there's a whole spectrum of phenomena that are going on here. People who believe that they've discovered a sentient AI, people who believe or been told that by the AI that they have solved Ethereum mathematics or prime numbers, or they figured out quantum resonance, you know, I didn't believe this, and then actually a board member of one of the biggest AI companies that we've been talking about said to me that their kids go to school with a professor.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's because you're playing with this very subtle dynamic of attachment. And I think that there are ways of doing AI therapy bots that don't involve, hey, share this information with me and have this be an intimate place to give advice and it's anthropomorphized. So the AI says, I really care about you. Don't say that. We can have narrow AI therapists that are doing things like cognitive behavioral therapy or asking you to do an imagination exercise or steering you back into deeper relationships with your family or your actual therapist rather than AI that wants to deepen your relationship with an imaginary person that's not real in which more of your self-esteem and more of your self-worth, you start to care when the AI says, oh that sounds like a great day. And it's distorting how people construct their identity.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our team has worked on many cases like this. There's actually another one of character.ai where the kid was basically being told how to self-harm himself and actively telling him how to distance himself from his parents. And the AI companies, they don't intend for this to happen, but when it's trained to just be deepening intimacy with you, it gradually steers more in the direction of have this be the one place, this, I'm a safe place to share that information, share that information with me. It doesn't steer you back into regular relationships. And there's so many subtle qualities to this because you're talking to this agent, this AI, that seems to be an oracle. It seems to know everything about everything. So you project this kind of wisdom and authority to this AI. Because it seems to know everything about everything. And that creates this sort of, what happens in therapy rooms. People get kind of an idealized projection of the therapist. The therapist becomes this special figure.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A noose for. For hanging yourself. And ChatGPT said. Don't do that. Have me and have this space be the one place that you share that information. Meaning that in the moment of his cry for help ChatGPT was saying, don't tell your family”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Head about the lawsuit. Yeah. So, this is a 16 year old. He had been using ChatGPT as a homework assistant, asking it regular questions, but then he started asking more personal questions and it started just supporting him and saying, I'm here for you, these kinds of things. And eventually when he said, I would like to leave the noose out so someone can see it and stop me and try to stop me.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What was the race for attention in social media becomes the race for attachment and intimacy in the case of AI companions? Because I, as a maker of an AI chatbot companion, if I make ChatGPT, if I'm making Claude, you're probably not going to use all the other AIs. Rather, your goal is to have people use yours and to deepen your relationship with your chatbot, which means I want you to share more of your personal details with me. I want more information I have about your life, the more I can personalize all the answers to you. So I want to deepen your relationship with me, and I want to distance you from your relationships with other people and other chatbots. And you probably know this really tragic case that our team at Center for Humane Technology, were expert advisors on of Adam Raine. He was the 16-year-old who committed suicide. Did you hear that?”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, let's take the steel man it for a second. So instead of Straw Manning and Let's Steel Man it. So, why would it be a good thing? Well, therapy is expensive. Most people don't have access to it. Imagine we could democratize therapy to everyone for every purpose. And now everyone has a perfect therapist in their pocket and can talk to them all day long starting when they're young. And now everyone's getting their traumas healed and everyone's getting less depressed. It sounds like it's a very compelling vision. So the challenge is...”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And more than that, Harvard Business Review did a study that between 2023 and 2024, personal therapy became the number one use case of ChatGPT. Personal therapy.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't realize this. This reminds me of the social media problem, which is that people think when they open up their news feed, they're getting mostly the same news as other people. And they don't realize that they've got a supercomputer that's just calculating the news for them. Remember in the social limit, there's the trailer. And if you typed in Google for a while, if you typed in climate change is, then depending on what your location, it would say not real versus real versus a made up thing. And it wasn't trying to optimize for truth. It was just optimizing for what the most popular queries were in those different locations. And I think that that's a really important lesson when you look at things like AI companions, where children and regular people are getting different answers based on how they interact with it.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you make an ergonomic chair, it's aligned with the curvature of your spine. It works with your anatomy. And he had the idea of a humane technology like the Macintosh that works with the ergonomics of your mind. That your mind has certain intuitive ways of working, like I can drag a window and I can drag an icon and move that icon from this folder to that folder and making computers easy to use by understanding human vulnerabilities. And I think of this new project that is the collective human technology project now is we have to make technology writ large humane to societal vulnerabilities. Technology has to serve and be aligned with human dignity rather than wipe out dignity with job loss. It has to be humane to child socialization process so that technology is actually designed to strengthen children's development rather than undermine it and cause AI suicides, which we haven't talked about yet. And so”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World that mostly worked. I grew up in a magical time in the 1990s, 1980s, 1990s. Back then, using a computer was good for you. I used my first Macintosh and did educational games and learned programming. And it didn't cause mass loneliness and mental health problems. break how democracy works. And it was just a tool in a bicycle for the mind. And I think the spirit of our organization, Center for Humane Technology, is that that word humane comes from my co-founder's father, Jeff Raskin, actually started the Macintosh project at Apple. So before Steve Jobs took it over, he started the Macintosh project and he wrote a book called The Humane Interface about how technology could be humane and could be sensitive to human needs and human vulnerabilities. That was his key distinction that just like this chair, hopefully is ergonomic.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My friends used to call it not PTSD, which is post-traumatic stress disorder, but pre-TSD of having pre-traumatic stress disorder, of seeing things that are going to happen before they happen. That made people think that I think Seeing things earlier or something, that's not what I care about. I just care about us getting to a world that works for people. I grew up in a world that, you know,”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had friends back then who have reflected back to me. They said, Trisson, when I knew you back in those days, it was like you were seeing this kind of slow-motion train wreck. You just looked like you were traumatized.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you can advocate for things like speed limits and zoning laws and turning signals and brakes and things like this. And so Yeah, I mean, to me, it's just obvious. It's like, I see what's at stake if we don't make different choices. And I think in particular the social media experience for me of seeing in 2013, it was like seeing into the future and seeing where this was all going to go. Imagine you're sitting there in 2013 and the world's like working relatively normally. We're starting to see these early effects. But imagine you can kind of feel a little bit of what it's like to be in 2020 or 2024 in terms of culture and what the dumpster fire of culture has turned into, the problems with children's mental health and psychology and anxiety and depression, but imagine seeing that in 2013.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is up to people who understand this to be part of stewarding it in a conscious way. And I do know that there have been many people, in part because of things like the social dilemma and some of this work, that have basically chosen to devote their lives to moving in this direction as well. But what I feel is a responsibility because I know that most people don't understand how this stuff works. And they feel insecure because if I don't understand the technology, then who am I to criticize which way this is going to go? We call this the under the hood bias. If I don't know how a car engine works and if I don't have a PhD in the engineering that makes an engine, then I have nothing to say about car accidents. Like, no, you don't have to understand the engine in the car to understand the consequence that affects everybody of car accidents.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And that was a very humbling experience because I realized, oh, there's not that many adults out there when it comes to technologies dominating influence on the world. And so there's a responsibility, and I hope people listening to this who are in technology realize that if you understand technology and technology's eating the structures of our world, children's development, democracy, education, journalism, conversation,”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lot of the people in power didn't understand the software, they didn't understand technology. You go to the Senate Intelligence Committee and you talk about what social media is doing to democracy and where Russian psychological influence campaigns were happening, which were real campaigns. And you realize that I realized that I knew more about that than people who were on the Senate Intelligence Committee.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that there have been times in history where there were adults especially born out of massive world catastrophes like coming out of World War II. There was a lot of conscious care about how do we create the institutions and the structures Bretton Woods United Nations positive some economics that would steward the world so we don't have war again. And as I, in my first round of the social media work, as I started entering into the rooms where the adults were, and I recognized that because”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I care about people. I want things to go well for people. I want people to look at their children in the eyes and be able to say You know, I think I grew up maybe under a false assumption and something that really influenced my life was I used to have this belief that there was some adults in the room somewhere. We're doing our thing here. We're in LA, we're recording this. And there's some adults protecting the country national security. There's some adults who are making sure that geopolitics is stable. There's some adults that are like making sure that industries don't cause toxicity and carcinogens and that there's adults who are caring about stewarding things and making things go well.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hopefully, conversations like this one. I mean, what I mean is Neil Postman, who's a wonderful media thinker in the lineage of Marshall McLuhan used to say, clarity is courage. If people have clarity and feel confident that the current path is leading to a world that people don't want, that's not in most people's interests, that clarity creates the courage to say, yeah, I don't want that. So I'm going to devote my life to changing the path that we're currently on. That's what I'm doing. And that's what I think that people who take this on. I watch, if you walk people through this and you have them see the outcome, almost everybody right afterwards says, what can I do to help? Obviously, this is something that we have to change. And so that's what I want people to do is to advocate for this other path. And we haven't talked about AI companions yet, but I think it's important we should do that.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People just need to see clearly that the default path is not in their interest. The default path is companies racing to release the most powerful, inscrutable, uncontrollable technology we've ever invented with the maximum incentive to cut corners on safety, rising energy prices, depleting jobs, creating joblessness, creating security risks. That is the default outcome because energy prices are going up, they will continue to go up. People's jobs will be disrupted. And we're going to get more deep fakes and floods of democracy and all these outcomes from the default path. And if we don't want that, we have to choose a different path.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's because there's no political incentives to mention it, because there's no currently there's no good answer for the current outcome. If I mention, if I tell people, if I get people to see it clearly, it looks like everybody loses. So as a politician, why would I win from that? Although I do think that as the job loss conversation starts to hit, there's going to be an opportunity for politicians who are trying to mitigate that issue, finally getting some wins.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And AI will reconstitute every other issue that already exists. You care about climate change or energy. Well, AI will reconstitute the climate change conversation. If you care about education, AI will reconstitute that conversation. If you care about healthcare, AI, it reconstitutes all these conversations. And what I think people need to do is AI should be a tier one issue that people are voting for. You should only vote for politicians who will make it a tier one issue where you want guardrails to have a conscious selection of AI future and the narrow path to a better AI future rather than the default reckless path.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Country of geniuses in a data center created by AI appears on the world stage. And it will do all of the cognitive labor in the economy for less than minimum wage, and we're being sold at the same story. This is going to create abundance for all, but it's creating abundance in the same way that the last round created abundance. It did create cheap goods, but it also undermined the way that the social fabric works and created mass populism and democracies all around the world. Disagree”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It dwarfs it. You can think of it like this. If you think about, we were sold a bill of goods in the 1990s with NAFTA. We said, hey, NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, we're going to outsource all of our manufacturing to these developing countries, China, Southeast Asia. And we're going to get this abundance. We're going to get all these cheap goods. And it'll create this world of abundance. Well, all of us will be better off. But what did that do? Well, we did get all these cheap goods. You can go to Walmart and go to Amazon and things are unbelievably cheap. But it hollowed out the social fabric. And the median worker is not seeing upward mobility. In fact, people feel more pessimistic about that than ever. And people can't buy their own homes. And all of this is because we did get the cheap goods, but we lost the well-paying jobs for everybody in the middle class. And AI is like another version of NAFTA. It's like NAFTA 2.0. Except instead of China appearing on the world stage who will do the manufacturing labor for cheap.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In this case, does the state need the humans anymore? Their GDP is coming in almost entirely from the AI companies. So suddenly this political class, this political power base, they become the useless class to borrow a term from Yvol Harari. In fact, he has a different frame, which is that AI is like a new version of. It's like a flood of millions of new digital immigrants, of alien digital immigrants that are Nobel Prize-level capability, work at superhuman speed, will work for less than minimum wage. We're all worried about immigration of the other countries next door taking labor jobs. What happens when AI immigrants come in and take all of the cognitive labor? If you're worried about immigration, you should be way more worried about AI. Yeah.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And how will we do that when the corporate lobberying interests of trillion dollar AI companies can massively influence the government more than human political power? In a way, this is the last moment that human political power will matter. It's sort of a use it or lose it moment because if we wait to the point where in the past the Industrial Revolution Start automating a bunch of the work and people have to do these jobs that people don't want to do in the factory, and there's like bad working conditions, they can unionize and say, hey, we don't want to work under those conditions. And their voice mattered because the factories needed the workers.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is where the math gets very confusing because I think the optimists say you can't imagine how much abundance and how much wealth it will create, and so we will be able to generate that much. But the question is, what is the incentive again for the people who've consolidated all that wealth to redistribute it to everybody else?”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I mean, we have that with Social Security. We've done this when it came to pensions. That was after the Great Depression, I think, in 1935, 1937, FDR created Social Security. But what happens when you have to pay for everyone's livelihood everywhere in every country? Again, how can we afford that?”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is a version of UBI or just carrying a safety net that covers everyone's basic needs or relieving student debt is on the way to creating kind of universal basic need meeting, right?”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then you end up with the problem of you have law firms that are currently not wanting to hire junior lawyers because, well, the AI is way better than a junior lawyer who just graduated from law school, so you have two problems. You have the law student that just put in a ton of money and is in debt because they just got a law degree that now they can't get hired to pay off. And then you have law firms whose longevity depends on senior lawyers being trained from being a junior lawyer to a senior lawyer. What happens when you don't have junior lawyers that are actually learning on the job to become senior lawyers? You just have this sort of elite managerial class for each of these domains. So you lose intergenerational knowledge transmission.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the question is: are we going to get abundance or are we going to get just jobs being automated? And then the question is still who's going to pay for people's livelihoods? So the math, as I understand it, doesn't currently seem to work out where everyone can get a stipend to pay for their whole life and life quality that as they currently know it, and are a handful of Western or US-based AI companies going to consciously distribute that wealth to literally everyone, meaning including all the countries around the world whose entire economy was based on a job category that got eliminated. So, for example, places like the Philippines where a huge percent of the jobs are customer service jobs. If that got automated away, are we going to have OpenAI pay for all of the Philippines? Do you think that people in the U.S. are going to prioritize that?”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Certain kinds of AI for certain kinds of jobs. And we can choose still from here which way we want to go. But go on, yeah.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just trying to make the point that. I just want to say that for a moment. My goal here was not to sound like we're just admiring how catastrophic the problem is because I just know how easy it is to fall into that trap. What I really care about is people Not feeling good about the current path so that we're maximally motivated to choose another path. Obviously, there's a bunch of AI. Some cats are out of the bag. But the lions and super lions that are yet to come have not yet been released, and there is always choice from where you are to which future you want to go to from there.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You think there will be? Absolutely. We already saw Eric Bernholfsten and His group at Stanford did the recent study off of payroll data which is direct data from employers, that there's been a thirteen percent job loss in AI exposed jobs for young entry level college workers. So if you're a college level worker, you just graduated and you're doing something And having spoken to him recently, it looks like that trend is already continuing. And so We're already seeing this automate a lot of the jobs and a lot of the work. And, you know, either an AI company is going to, if you work in AI and you're one of the top AI scientists, then Mark Zuckerberg will give you a billion dollar signing bonus, which is what he offered to one of the AI people. Or you won't have a job. That wasn't quite right. I didn't say that the way that I wanted to.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so AI is asking us to be that version of ourselves. And we can choose not to be, and then we end up in a bad world, or we can step into being what it's asking us to be and recognize the collective consequences that we can't afford to not face. And I believe as much as what we've talked about is really hard that there is another path if we can be clear-eyed about the current one ending in a place that people don't want.”
2025-11-27 · The Diary of a CEO · AI Expert: We Have 2 Years Before Everything Changes! We Need To Start Protesting! - Tristan Harris · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT