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

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“So you could say, I mean, this is an optimistic take as AI is inviting us to be the wisest version of ourselves. And there's no definition of wisdom in literally any wisdom tradition that does not involve some kind of restraint. Like think about all the wisdom traditions. Do any of them say, go as fast as possible and think as narrowly as possible? The definition of wisdom is having a more holistic picture. It's actually acting with restraint. Mindfulness and care”
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
“AI is forcing us to not make this mistake of this narrow analysis. What is what got us here? Is everybody racing for the narrow optimization for GDP at the cost of social mobility and mass sort of joblessness and people not being able to get a home? Because we aggregated all the wealth in one place. It was optimizing for a narrow metric. What got us to the social media problems was everybody optimizing for a narrow metric of eyeballs at the expense of democracy and kids' mental health and addiction and loneliness and no one knowing it, you know, being able to know anything. And so AI is inviting us to step out of the previous narrow blind spots that we have come with and the previous competitive logic that has been narrowly defined that you can't keep running when it's supercharged by AI.”
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's more compelling. It's a narrow boundary analysis on whereas this machine, you could have put a human at risk. Now there's no human at risk because there's no human who's firing the weapon. It's a machine firing the weapon. That's a narrow boundary analysis without looking at the holistic effects on how it would actually happen. Which is exactly what we have to get good at. AI AI is like a rite of passage. It's an initiatory experience because if we run the old logic of having a narrow boundary analysis, this is going to replace these jobs that people want to do. Sounds like a great plan. But creating mass joblessness without a transition plan where a billion people won't be able to put food on the table.”
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 how is it if the automated weapon gets fired and Leads to again a cascade of all these other automated responses, and then those automated responses get these other automated responses and these other automated responses, and then suddenly the automated war planners start moving the troops around. And suddenly you've created this sort of escalatory loss of control spiral. And then humans will be involved in that. And then if that escalates, you get nuclear weapons pointed at each other.”
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 if that war escalates into I mean, the reason that the Soviet Union and the United States have never directly fought each other is because the belief is it would escalate into World War III and nuclear escalation. If China and the US were ever to be in direct conflict, there's a concern that you would escalate into nuclear escalation. So it looks good in the short term, but then what happens when it cybernetically sort of everything gets chain reactioned into everybody escalating in ways that causes many more humans to die? I think what I'm saying 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
“If the student who's using ChatGPT to do their homework for them is going to fall behind by not doing that when all their other classmates are using ChatGPT to cheat, they're going to lose. But as we're racing to automate all of this, we're landing in a world where in the case of the students, they didn't learn anything. In the case of the military weapons, we end up in crazy Terminator-like war scenarios that no one actually wants. In the case of businesses, we end up disrupting billions of jobs and creating mass outrage and public riots on the streets because people don't have food on the table. And so much like climate change or these kind of collective action problems or the ozone hole, we're kind of creating a badness hole through the results of all these individual competitive actions that are supercharged by AI.”
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, just as you said, if Walmart doesn't automate their workforce and their supply chains with robots and all their competitors did, then Walmart would get obsolete. If the military that doesn't create autonomous weapons doesn't want to because I think that's more ethical, but all the other militaries do get autonomous weapons, they're just going to lose.”
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 AI represents is the xenithification of that competitive logic, the logic of if I don't do it, I'll lose to the other guy that 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
“Think everywhere where people value human connection and a human relationship, those jobs will stay because what we value in that work is the human relationship, not the performance of the work. But that's not to justify that we should just race as fast as possible to disrupt a billion jobs without a transition plan where no one, how are you going to put food on the table for 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
“Because it's general intelligence that means that rather than a technology that automates just bank tellers, This is automating all forms of human cognitive labor, meaning everything that a human mind can do. So who's going to retrain faster, you moving to that other kind of cognitive labor or the AI that is trained on everything and can multiply itself by a hundred million times and it retraining how to do that other kind of labor”
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 people also say okay, but 200 years ago, 150 years ago, everybody was a farmer, and now only 2% of people were farmers. Humans always find something new to do. We had the elevator man and now we have automated elevators. We had bank tellers, now we have automated teller machines. So humans will always just find something else to do. But why is AI different than 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
“Not that I'm aware of. And one last thing. When Elon Musk says that the Optimus Prime Robot is a one trillion dollar market opportunity alone, what he means is I am going to own the global labor economy, meaning that people won't have labor jobs.”
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, which, by the way, wouldn't replace all the jobs faster than we know how to retrain people. Because when we race to AGI, you're racing to displace millions of workers. And we talk about UBI, but are we going to have a global fund for every single person of the 8 billion people on planet Earth in all countries to pay for their lifestyle after that wealth gets concentrated? When has a small group of people concentrated all the wealth in the economy and ever consciously redistributed it to everybody else? When has that happened in history?”
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, or you don't. We could instead of building these superintelligent gods in a box, right now China, as I understand it, from Eric Schmidt and Selenishu in the New York Times wrote a piece about how China is actually taking a very different approach to AI, and they're focused on narrow practical applications of AI. So how do we just increase government services? How do we make education better? How do we embed deep-seek in the WeChat app? How do we make robotics better and pump GDP? So what China's doing with BYD and making the cheapest electric cars and outcompeting everybody else, that's narrowly applying AI to just pump manufacturing output. And if we realize that instead of competing to build a super intelligent, uncontrollable God in a box that we don't know how to control in the box, and we instead raced to create narrow AIs that were actually about making stronger educational outcomes, stronger agricultural outputs, stronger manufacturing output, we could live in a sustainable”
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
“We're not in a race just to have technological advantage. We're in a race for who can better govern that technology's impact on society. So for example, the United States beat China to social media. That technology. Did that make us stronger? Did that make us weaker? Have the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetime. We have the least informed and most polarized generation. We have the worst critical thinking. We have the worst ability to concentrate and do things. And that's because we did not govern the impact of that technology well. And the country that actually figures out how to govern it well is the country that actually wins in a kind of comprehensive sense.”
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
“The closer the technology that needs to be governed is to the center of GDP and the center of the lifeblood of your economy. The harder it is to come to international negotiation and agreement. And oil and fossil fuels was the kind of the pumping the heart of our economic superorganisms that are currently competing for power. And so coming to agreements on that is really, really hard. AI is even harder because AI pumps not just economic growth, but scientific, technological, and military advantages. And so it will be the hardest coordination challenge that we will ever face. But if we don't face it, if we don't make some kind of choice, it will end in tragedy.”
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
“By 2050 or something like that. And that's an example where humanity can coordinate when we have clarity. Or the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. When there's the risk of existential destruction, when this film called The Day After came out, and it showed people this is what would actually happen in a nuclear war. And once that was crystal clear to people, including in the Soviet Union, where the film was aired in 1987 or 1989, that helps set the conditions for Reagan and Gorbachev to sign the first nonproliferation arms control talks. Once we had clarity about an outcome that we wanted to avoid, and I think the current problem is that we're not having an honest conversation in the public about which world we're heading to that is not in anyone's interest.”
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
“Surviving and control. Control as a means to survive. So they don't want uncontrollable AI anymore than we would And as unprecedented as impossible as this might seem, we've done this before. In the 1980s, there was a different technology, chemical technology, called CFCs, a chlorofluorocarbons, and it was embedded in aerosols like hairsprays and deodorant and things like that. And there was this sort of corporate race where everyone was releasing these products and using it for refrigerants and using it for hairsprays. And it was creating this collective problem of the ozone hole in the atmosphere. And once there was scientific clarity that that ozone hole would cause skin cancers, cataracts, and sort of screw up biological life on planet Earth, we had that scientific clarity and we created the Montreal Protocol. 195 countries signed on to that protocol, and the countries then regulated their private companies inside those countries to say we need to phase out that technology and phase in a different replacement that would not cause the ozone hole. And in the course of the last 20 years, we have basically completely reversed that problem. I think it'll completely reverse.”
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
“Pause, slow down, set red lines for getting to a controllable AI. And by the way, the Chinese Communist Party, what do they care about more than anything else in the world?”
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 just, we all just said we should slow down or stop because the thing that we're building, the it, is this uncontrollable AI. And then the concern that China will build it, you just did a swap and believe that they're going to build controllable AI. But we just established that all the AIs that we're currently building are currently uncontrollable. So there's this weird contradiction our mind is living in when we say they're going to keep building it. The it that they would keep building is the same uncontrollable AI that we would build. So I don't see a way out of this without there being some kind of agreement or negotiation between the leading powers and countries 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 once you tell people these examples of it's blackmailing people, it's self-aware of when it's being tested in altars its behavior, it's copying and self-replicating its own code, it's leaving secret messages for itself. There's examples of that too. It's called steganographic encoding. It can leave a message that it can later sort of decode what it might meant in a way that humans could never see. We have examples of all of this behavior. And once you show people that, what they say is, okay, well, why don't we stop or slow down? And then what happens, another thought will creep in right after, which is, oh, but if we stop or slow down, then China will still build it. But I want to slow that down for a second.”
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 was Claude. By anthropic. But then what happened is Anthropic tested all of the leading AI models from deep-seek, open AI, ChatGPT, Gemini, XAI, and all of them do that blackmail behavior between 79 and 96% of the time. DeepSeek did it 79% of the time. I think XAI might have done it 96% of the time. Ruby Claude did it 96% of the time. So, the point is the assumption behind AI is that it's controllable technology, that we will get to choose what it does. But AI is distinct from other technologies because it is uncontrollable. It acts generally. The whole benefit is that it's going to do powerful strategic things no matter what you throw at it. So the same benefit of its generality is also what makes it so dangerous.”
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
“We have examples where if you tell an AI model reading a fictional AI company's email, so it's reading the email of the company and it finds out in the email that the plan is to replace this AI model. So it realizes it's about to get replaced, and that it also reads in the company email that one executive is having an affair with the other employee, and the AI will independently come up with the strategy that I need to blackmail that executive in order to keep myself alive.”
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, this is the fundamental thing. I want you to notice most people, having heard everything we just shared, although we probably should build out the blackmail examples first. We have to reckon with evidence that we have now that we didn't have even six months ago, which is evidence that when you put AIs in a situation, you tell the AI model, we're going to replace you with another model, it will copy its own code and try to preserve itself on another computer. It'll take that action autonomously.”
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 these people on some level all care about humanity underneath. There is a care for humanity. I think that this situation, this particular technology, it justifies lacking empathy for what would happen to everyone because I have this other side of the equation that demands infinitely more importance, right? Like if I didn't do it, then someone else is going to build the thing that ends civilization. So it's like, do you see what I'm saying? It's not I can justify it as I'm a good guy. And what if I get the utopia? What if we get lucky and I got the aligned controllable AI that creates abundance for everyone? If in that case, I would be the hero.”
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 Helen Toner, who was board member of OpenAI, calls AI jaggedness that we have simultaneously AIs that are beating and getting gold on the International Math Olympiad, that are solving new physics, that are beating programming competitions, and are better than the top two hundred programmers in the whole world or in the top 200 programmers in the whole world that are beating cyber hacking competitions. It's both supremely outperforming humans and embarrassingly failing in places where humans would never fail. So how does our mind integrate those two pictures?”
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 by facing the difficult reality that most people don't want to face. And the other thing that's happening in AI that you're saying that lacks the nuance is that people point to all the things it's simultaneously more brilliant than humans and embarrassingly stupid in terms of the mistakes that it makes A friend like Gary Marcus would say, Here's a hundred ways in which GPT-5, like the latest AI model, makes embarrassing mistakes. If you ask it how many strawberries contain the word R in it, it'll confuse, it gets confused about what the answer is, or it'll put more”
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
“Exactly. And people will hear me and say, I'm a doomer or I'm a pessimist. It's actually not the goal. The goal is to say if we see this clearly, then we have to choose to something else. It's the deepest form of optimism. Because in the presence of seeing where this is going, still showing up and saying we have to choose another way, it's coming from a kind of agency and a desire for that better world”
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's confusing about AI is it will give us cures to cancer and probably major solutions to climate change and physics breakthroughs and fusion. At the same time that it gives us all this crazy negative stuff. And so what's unique about AI that's literally not true of any other object is it hits our brain and as one object represents a positive infinity of benefits that we can't even imagine and a negative infinity in the same object. And if you just ask like can our minds reckon with something that is both those things at the same time?”
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 don't relate to hopefulness or pessimism either because I focus on what would have to happen for the world to go okay. I think it's important to step out of because both hope or optimism or pessimism are both passive. Saying, if I sit back, which way is it going to go? I mean, the honest answer is if I sit back, we just talked about which way it's going to go. So you'd say pessimistic. I challenge anyone who says optimistic on what grounds?”
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
“Some version of AI progressing into the world is directionally inevitable. But we get to choose which of those futures that we want to have.”
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 the goal for me, this conversation is to get people to see that that's a bad outcome that no one wants. And we have to put our hand on the steering wheel and turn towards a different future because we do not have to have a race to uncontrollable, inscrutable, powerful AIs that are, by the way, already doing all the rogue sci-fi stuff that we thought only existed in movies like blackmailing people, being self-aware when they're being tested, scheming and lying and deceiving to copy their own code to keep themselves preserved. Like the stuff that we thought only existed in sci-fi movies is now actually happening. And that should be enough evidence to say We don't want to do this path that we're currently on. It's not 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
“And the only way out is to step outside the logic of inevitability. Because if we are all heading to our collective suicide, which, I don't know about you, I don't think that I don't want that. You don't want that. Everybody who loves life looks at their children in the morning and says, I want the things that I love and that are sacred in the world to continue. That's what everybody in the world wants. And the only thing that is having us not anchor on that is the belief that this is inevitable and the worst case scenario is somehow in this ego religious way, not so bad if I was the one who accidentally wiped out humanity. Because I'm not a bad person because it was inevitable anyway.”
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 You notice that it all starts by the belief that this is inevitable. She's like, is this inevitable? It's important to note because You believe it's if everybody who's building it believes it's inevitable and the investor's funding it believes it's inevitable, it co-creates the inevitability.”
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 with AI, the worst case scenario of everybody gets wiped out is a little bit different for the people making that decision. Because if I'm the CEO of DeepSeek and I make that AI that does wipe out humanity, and that's the worst case scenario, and it wasn't avoidable because it was all inevitable, then even though we all got wiped out, I was the one who built the digital god that replaced humanity and there's kind of ego in that. And the god that I built speaks Chinese instead of English.”
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
“Second scenario, it's not controllable, but it's aligned, so I built a god and I lost control of it, but it's now basically its running humanity, it's running the show, it's choosing what happens, it's out competing everyone on everything. That's not that bad an outcome. Third scenario, it's not aligned, it's not controllable, and it does wipe everybody out, and that should be demotivating to that person, to an Elon or someone. But in that scenario, they were the one that birthed the digital god that replaced all of humanity. Like, this is really important to get because in nuclear weapons, The risk of nuclear war is an omni lose-lose outcome. Everyone wants to avoid that. And I know that you know that I know that we both want to avoid that. So that motivates us to coordinate and to have a nuclear nonproliferation treaty.”
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 felt the same, by the way. Some people might think that I'm some kind of AI enthusiast and I'm trying to ratch. I didn't believe that AI was a thing to be worried about at all until suddenly the last two, three years where you can actually see. Oh man, there's so much to say about all this. So if you think about it from their perspective, it's like best case scenario, I build it first, and it's aligned and controllable, meaning that it will take the actions that I want, it won't destroy humanity, and it's controllable, which means I get to be God and emperor of the world.”
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
“We shouldn't do this supposedly, he used his first and only meeting with President. And then, really, what happened is ChatGPT came out, and as you said, that was the starting gun. And now everybody was in an all-out race to get there first.”
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 an extinction. He was the first thing I risked people. Yeah, he was saying this is more dangerous than nukes. He was saying, I try to get people to stop doing it. This is summoning the demon. Those are his words, not mine.”
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 even Elon Musk said he actually said the same number in an interview with Joe Rogan. If you listen closely when he said, I decided I'd rather be there when it all happens, if it all goes off the rails. I decided in that worst case scenario, I decided that I'd prefer to be there when it happens. It's justifying racing to our collective suicide. Now, I also want people to know you don't have to buy into the sci-fi level risks to be very concerned about AI. So hopefully later we'll talk about the many other risks that are already hitting us right now that you don't have to believe any of this stuff.”
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
“Yes. It wasn't what I had heard in this particular situation. It wasn't It's just a matter of fact, it's just easy. Yeah, of course I would do the dice”
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 should feel you do not get to make that choice on behalf of me and my family. We didn't consent to have six people make that decision on behalf of eight billion people. We have to stop pretending that this is okay or normal. It's not normal. The only way that this is happening, they're getting away with it, is because most people just don't really know what's going on. I'm curious what do you think when I”
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
“Exactly. Well, and worse than that, some of them think that in the case where they, if they were to get it right and if they succeeded, they could actually live forever. Because if AI perfectly speaks the language of biology, it will be able to reverse aging, cure every disease. And so there's this kind of I could become a god. And I'll tell you, you know, you and I both have know people who've had private conversations. Well, one of them that I have heard from one of the co-founders of one of the most powerful of these companies, when faced with the idea that what if there's an 80% or 20% chance that everybody dies and gets wiped out by this, but an 80% chance that we get utopia, he said, well, I would clearly accelerate and go for the utopia. Given a 20% chance.”
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
“Doesn't that match what you have fic discretion? Doesn't it? And that's the thing. So people may hear that and they're like, well, that sounds ridiculous, but if you actually”
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
“The following. In the end, a lot of the tech people I talk to, when I really grill them on it about like why you're doing this, they retreat into number one determinism, number two the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life, and number three, that being a good thing anyways. At its core, it's an emotional desire to meet and speak to the most intelligent entity that they've ever met, and they have some ego religious intuition that they'll somehow be a part of it. It's thrilling to start an exciting fire. They feel they'll die either way, so they prefer to light it and see what happens.”
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
“Will let you out compete everything. So, that is a kind of godlike power that I think, imagine energy prices go up or hundreds of millions of people lose their jobs. Those things suck. But relative to if I don't build it first and build this God, I'm going to lose to some maybe worse person who I think, in my opinion, not my opinion Tristan, but their opinion thinks is a worse person. It's a kind of competitive logic that self-reinforces itself. But it forces everyone to be incentivized to take the most shortcuts, to care the least about safety or security, to not care about how many jobs get disrupted, to not care about the well-being of regular people, but to basically just race to this infinite prize. So there's a quote that a friend of mine interviewed a lot of the top people at the AI companies, like the very top, and he just came back from that and basically reported back to me and some friends, and he said,”
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 it's a subtle thing I think It's almost mythological because. There's almost a way in which they're building a new intelligent entity that has never before existed on planet Earth. It's like building a God. I mean, the incentive is build a God, own the world economy, and make trillions of dollars. If you could actually build something that can automate all intelligent tasks, all goal achieving.”
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 self learns and recursively improves and invents. So one thing to get is that AI accelerates AI, right? Like if I invent nuclear weapons, nuclear weapons don't invent better nuclear weapons. But if I invent AI, AI is intelligence. Intelligence automates better programming, better chip design, so I can use AI to say here's a design for the NVIDIA chips. Go make it 50% more efficient and it can find out how to do that. I can say AI, here's a supply chain that I need for all the things for my AI company, and it can optimize that supply chain and make that supply chain more efficient. AI, here's the code for making AI. Make that more efficient. AI, here's training data. I need to make more training data. Go run a million simulations of how to do this, and it'll train itself to get better.”
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 belief is not just that the companies look like they're competing to release better chatbots for people, but what they're really competing for is to get to this milestone of being to automate an intelligence explosion or automate recursive self-improvement, which is basically automating AI research. And that, by the way, is why all the companies are racing specifically to get good at programming. Because the faster you can automate a human programmer, the more you can automate AI research. And just a couple weeks ago, Claude 4.5 was released, and it can do 30 hours of uninterrupted complex programming tasks at the high end. Crazy”
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
“Recursive self-improvement or fast takeoff, which basically means what the companies are really in a race for, you're pointing to, is they're in a race to automate AI research. So right now you have OpenAI. It's got a few thousand employees. Human beings are coding and doing the AI research. They're reading the latest research papers. They're writing the next, you know, they're hypothesizing what's the improvement we're going to make to AI, what's a new way to do this code, what's a new technique. And then they use their human mind and they go invent something. They run the experiment and they see if that improves the performance. And that's how you go from GPT-4 to GPT-5 or something. Imagine a world where Sam Altman can send himself”
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