Transcript: Tucker Carlson Interviews Tristan Harris on Rogue AI  

How did we develop nuclear physics? Einstein doing intelligence.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:05:03 – 00:05:03) Yeah,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:05:03 – 00:06:48) we train physicists. How did we get computers? How do we get microprocessors? Intelligence. If you could theoretically automate what intelligence is, which means thinking, pattern matching, goal achieving, all the things that a human brain does, but not just narrowly like a license plate reader that’s on a bridge toll booth, which is the previous form of AI that we had, but actually get this generalized form of intelligence, then you would have an unbelievable amount of power.

And the people building AI think of AI almost like the ring from Lord of the Rings, where it is a ring that confers infinite power. Suddenly I get a step function in cyber capability that you don’t have. Suddenly I get a step function in 24th century science where I’m inventing new materials out of minerals in the ground that you didn’t know how to do because I’ve got more science than you.

So the reason, just to sort of steelman rather than strawman the argument of the people racing right now, is the belief that it’s almost like a fast-forward button. Remember the fast-forward buttons on airplanes? You were just going to, you hit it once and it gets 2x, you hit it again, you get 4x, then 8x, then 16x. AI is like hitting the fast-forward button on all science and technological and military and strategy advancement combined, right?

So that’s why AI in the form that is being pursued dwarfs the power of all other technologies combined. That’s not an overstatement if you really believe or are, quote, “AGI-pilled,” which is the term of art from Silicon Valley, that AGI being artificial general intelligence, if I can build the intelligence that automates future science and technology, I get 100 years of scientific progress in 10 years. And if I’m a country that has that and the other country doesn’t, then I believe I’m going to, quote, “win.”

The Fallacy That Technology Always Equals Progress

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:06:48 – 00:07:03) So you lost me right there. Why would you want that? No, I’m not pushing back. I’m just more baffled than ever. If AI has the effect of accelerating technology just across the board, all technologies, my first question would be, why would you want that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:07:03 – 00:07:03) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:04 – 00:07:09) So I remember the world vividly the year I got married, 1991, when there was no internet available to most people.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:07:09 – 00:07:09) Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:10 – 00:07:19) And it was a much happier world by every measure than the one we currently live in. The suicide rate was lower. Yep. Self-reported depression, marriage rate, everything about it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:07:19 – 00:07:19) That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:20 – 00:07:31) In fact, I think life expectancy was longer in the United States even then. I might be wrong, but Education. So why would you, after 35 years of watching people suffer under the yoke of technology,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:07:32 – 00:07:32) yes,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:32 – 00:07:34) why would you want to accelerate its development?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:07:34 – 00:07:53) Right. That is the best question to ask because there’s a fundamental fallacy that technology always equals progress. We call this the tech progress narrative, right? Now, it’s important to note we have to first agree that I would prefer to live in a world with Novocaine rather than without Novocaine.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:07:53 – 00:07:54) Yeah, you would too. Yeah.

Inside Google: The Attention Economy

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:07:54 – 00:08:27) I’d prefer to live in a world where we have access to information and the technology that produces the printing press and information that way. Yes, I’d prefer to live in that world. There are all sorts of technologies that we do want.

My background is seeing how one of the most significant technologies of the last decade went wrong. I was a design ethicist at Google, and my job was to study the attention economy, which is how essentially Apple and Google were hosting the psychological habitat of all of humanity in the form of how they design and make these things work.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:08:27 – 00:08:27) Yes.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:08:27 – 00:09:06) How do notifications work? How does the home screen work? What are app developers competing for? What are they allowed to do? All of that results in a psychological habitat that has an increasing footprint over the global consciousness environment of all of humanity every day.

It’s like you’ve got 3 billion human social primates with a jack in their brain every day influenced by decisions by a few thousand people in Silicon Valley shaping what that habitat represents. And it went horribly wrong despite good intentions. There was the possible of that technology that it was going to give everyone a voice, give everyone access to the best information. We’re going to have the most enlightened society we ever had.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:09:07 – 00:09:07) That was the promise.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:09:07 – 00:09:08) And that was the promise.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:09:08 – 00:09:09) Made sense to me.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:09:09 – 00:10:29) And so what this shows us is how do we get better at discerning between the possible of a technology and the probable? Based on its incentives. So the way that in 2013, so I went to Stanford, I knew the, I studied computer science, I knew the guys who started Instagram.

And a lot of my classmates, when I was in my computer science classes in the year 2005, 2006, I’d be in these classes and suddenly more and more of the seats would be empty during class because basically my friends in the class were starting to get jobs down at Facebook down the street. And it was literally the case. I mean, there were people who were in the class and then suddenly they just weren’t showing up because they were down the street working at this technology company.

And so because I saw this firsthand, I saw how good people with good intentions who thought they were going to make the world a better place, “make the world more open and connected,” was the original motto, if you remember, of Facebook. And that created a global societal catastrophe. As you said, we have the most anxious and depressed generation of our lifetimes. Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation.

Critical thinking skills are down. Attention spans are down. Polarization, tribalism, all of this came from not the malicious intent of these 20-year-olds who are working at Facebook, but the bad incentives. And I repeat this quote often, but I think it’s so fundamental. The Charlie Munger quote, it’s Warren Buffett’s business partner.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:10:29 – 00:10:29) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:10:29 – 00:10:33) “If you show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:10:33 – 00:10:33) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:10:33 – 00:10:47) Were the incentives of social media companies to make the world more open and connected or to improve mental health of young people? No, their incentives were maximizing how much attention they get because the business model of advertising is that

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:10:47 – 00:10:48) you

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:10:48 – 00:11:31) boost share price. Share price is directly correlated to minutes spent, frequency of usage, duration of usage. So what you’re going to get are of all, imagine a spectrum of all the ways you could design technology.

And over here, you’ve got a bunch of very thoughtful design decisions about keeping people, helping people connect with their friends in real life. With their families, hosting community groups, church groups, reading clubs, sewing clubs, hiking groups. And you’ve got design of technology that it’s going to steer people back into that versus over here, you’ve got a bunch of designs for social media that just keep people glued on screens by themselves with their esophagus compressed, their neck extension, going like this and basically doom scrolling for 8 hours a day. Which one of those 2 worlds, which one of those design choices is going to be better for shareholder price?

Giving People What They Want or What They Can’t Help But Look At?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:12:31 – 00:12:35) So the point is, first of all, there’s actually a hidden optimism here.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:12:35 – 00:12:38) So discrediting of markets and of market theology.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:12:38 – 00:12:39) Well, it’s about what are markets—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:12:39 – 00:12:41) give people what they want until they die?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:12:41 – 00:12:45) Yeah, well, the question is, are we giving them what they want or what they can’t help but look at?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:12:45 – 00:12:46) Well, that’s—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:12:46 – 00:14:04) with an asymmetry of information where the designers at the tech companies know exactly how your brain works and they manipulate the design choices to keep you scrolling for as long as possible. So this is all in the Netflix— most people know me and our work through the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. And we had a lot of the insiders coming out who said, we know what this is doing to people.

And in that film, it talks about the history where I was at Stanford at a lab or part of a class called the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab, professor named BJ Fogg, and where engineers were taught how to do persuasion techniques that theoretically be things that are good. How would we persuade you to go to the gym more often? And how would technology play a positive role in you to go to the gym more often, or you’ve got a signup form and LinkedIn can put a progress bar in the top right saying, hey, you filled in this much of your LinkedIn profile, but we want you to come back and fill in more.

So we’ll put a progress bar in the top right saying you filled in 60%. It sounds really stupid and dumb, but if you put a progress bar in the top right-hand corner, that actually is very persuasive in getting people to fill out the rest of it. And most people don’t think about this.

If I put a design feature in WhatsApp that says you were last online 3 minutes ago, That changes the whole messaging environment. Suddenly, when you message people, you know that the other person knows that you were online 3 minutes ago, which means you feel obligated to respond to them.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:14:04 – 00:14:05) Yes.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:14:05 – 00:14:58) Because your public, your availability and onlineness was visible and made transparent to someone else. But that was a design choice. It could have been designed totally differently. We don’t have to put a progress bar on the LinkedIn profile. We don’t have to say you were last online 5 minutes ago and create social pressure. So the point is, technology isn’t destiny on its own. The way we design it creates different societal outcomes.

And because of the business model of maximizing attention and engagement, we got only the side of design choices that resulted in this more addicted, distracted, polarized, sexualized, screwed up, doom scrolling, brain rotted society that we are now living in when you go outside. And from my perspective, in 2013, seeing those incentives, it was like, oh s***.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:14:59 – 00:14:59) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:15:00 – 00:15:04) Because you could just see the trajectory before it happened.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:15:05 – 00:15:05) In 2013?

Doubt Club and the Ethics You Can Afford

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:15:06 – 00:15:27) In 2013, yeah. I mean, so I, so by the way, I did the tech entrepreneurship thing. I raised venture capital. I’m a builder of technology. I understand the kind of normal, I did the Stanford Entrepreneurship Program, the same one that Sam Altman did, by the way, called the Mayfield Fellows Program. So I came up in a cohort of some of these people, but I could see it from a different angle. And for the company that I started, I was under these.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:15:27 – 00:15:28) Why were you able to see it?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:15:29 – 00:15:41) Well, I wasn’t able to see it at first. Part of it was actually, I relate to their, the blind spots, which is, you’ve talked about this with your own work, that when you have a salary, you can’t, something, you can’t question something that your salary depends on you not to.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:15:41 – 00:15:41) It’s true. It’s so true.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:15:41 – 00:17:26) It’s so true. And it wasn’t so much my salary, but the business model being the kind of salary of the company. If the business model is maximizing time and engagement, you come up with ways to justify that that’s a good thing, right? And you can only have the ethics that you can afford underneath that perverse incentive.

So you start to see things in terms of what’s compatible with those incentives. Oh, we are making the world more open and connected. Oh, small, medium-sized businesses were able to reach so many more people on Facebook and Instagram now. Think of all of the new revenue and customers that we’re generating because we’re so good at routing attention.

And it’s not that those are false stories. It just hides the shadow. There’s almost like a Jungian shadow for technology. Yes, you created these things, but you also have this massive shadow of creating a societal catastrophe at the same time. And I think there’s a tendency to try to do moral arithmetic of do the upsides minus the downsides equal net positive? It’s this very simple moral arithmetic.

And the answer is, don’t brain rot and destroy the culture of a population and create a dumpster fire of your politics, your tribalism, the mental health of a generation. We don’t have to do that.

And so the, I guess the point here is, yeah, so I started this company. I was under the incentives of maximizing time and engagement. Actually, our business model is basically telling a Washington Post or New York Times or The Economist or Fox News, We can increase the amount of time people spend on their website by giving them more information without leaving the webpage that they’re on.

That was essentially the value proposition. It was this widget that basically let you say, I want to learn more about that. Tell me more. And it would give multimedia and background information and voting records and videos and maps and all this stuff on the page of Fox News without leaving Fox News.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:17:26 – 00:17:27) Right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:17:27 – 00:17:28) So sounds like a great proposition.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:17:28 – 00:17:29) Definitely.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:17:29 – 00:19:11) But then the entire company became based on maximizing how much time people spent there. And so I myself was kind of in this inner conflict. And I went through that. It’s actually funny. I had a group of friends who also had small tech companies. We’re all about the same age. We’re probably 27, 28. Only studied computer science, very reflective of the culture of the people there.

And we had a thing called Doubt Club. And the point of Doubt Club, like Fight Club, is you can’t talk about Doubt Club. And the point is that as a founder of a tech company, you don’t have a space where you can essentially talk about your doubts about what you’re doing. Is this even good for the world? So we talked about our doubts about what we were building, doubts about what this meant for our lives, and doubts about whether we were actually doing a good thing.

And that led me to basically realize that we needed to let go of the company. It got acquired by Google. And so I landed at Google through basically reckoning with the conflict of incentives that I was under. And then it was at Google that I saw how a much bigger ecosystem, obviously the entire, all the social media platforms were under those same perverse incentives.

So I think that gave me an early insight into how this would go wrong. And I tried to warn my colleagues at Google in a 2013 presentation saying, this small group of basically 100 designers working at 3 companies are designing again this psychological environment for all of humanity.

And if we don’t get ahead of the incentives, this is going to create an arms race for attention and engagement and design choices that will become a race to the bottom of the brainstem to psychologically manipulate human nature and then lead to accidentally this kind of brain-rotted society. So that’s how—

The 2013 Slide Deck That Went Viral at Google

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:19:11 – 00:19:13) how did they respond when you said that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:19:14 – 00:21:17) So I made this the slide deck and I sent it. I actually felt nervous making it because I was criticizing And it wasn’t meant to be adversarial or claiming that Google was evil. I’m not an attention-seeking person. I wasn’t trying to be angry at anybody. I was just naming a problem. And I sent it to about 30 of my smartest friends at Google.

And I thought surely other people were working on this. Google’s this incredibly brilliant company with the smartest PhDs. They’re going to say, that’s nice, kid, but we’ve got this handled. We thought about this problem.

To my surprise, when I came back the next day after only sending it to 30 people, In the Google Slides, you can see the number of simultaneous viewers on the top right-hand corner of people looking at a Google Doc or a slide deck. And there was 150 simultaneous viewers, but I only sent it to 30 people. So what had happened is it started getting spread virally throughout the whole company. And soon there was thousands of simultaneous viewers.

And I learned that in the next day, it had gone up to Larry Page, who’s the co-founder of Google. And there was a meeting about it. And so all this was to say that it was received in a way that I think people felt this is a real problem. And I got emails from all around the company, yeah, we should do something about this. This is a real thing we’ve got to manage.

And that’s how I landed as a Google design ethicist, studying how do you ethically design technology. And that’s what became kind of my core ethos in general of how do you do technology in a way that’s compatible with the health, well-being, and flourishing of a society.

And watching in 2013 these bad incentives, it was like having, instead of post-traumatic stress disorder, it was my friend’s joke, it was like having pre-traumatic stress disorder because I saw where this was going. And I think a lot of what motivates me in the conversation that I know we’re going to have about AI is I don’t want to see us make a total disaster again, and I’ve watched it happen.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:21:17 – 00:22:40) So of the other members of Doubt Club, how many are still in the business you were in when you were—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:22:41 – 00:22:42) None of them. They’re all doing other things now.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:22:43 – 00:22:43) Really?

Why AI Is Different: Nukes Don’t Make Better Nukes

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:22:44 – 00:24:11) Yeah. Which is to say, once you reckon with something, you can only have the ethics you can afford. So you find a different way, you find a different business model. And people hearing that might say, oh, therefore now your business model is warning people about technology and doing speaking engagements.

I just want to be clear for the record. I don’t make money from speaking engagements. All the money goes into our nonprofit. I don’t actually give speaking engagements very often. I just care about and have for the last 10 years with our nonprofit, the Center for Humane Technology, think about how do you do design for technology in a positive and ethical way? How do you change the incentives?

How do you do policy and litigation that changes the incentives like the Meta lawsuit of $17 billion that happened just 3, 4 weeks ago that was catalyzed by a bunch of the attorney general, attorneys general watching The Social Dilemma in 2021. So I’ve seen how if you have dedicated advocacy, if you show people the nature of a problem, there can be a response.

Now, that one took way too long and way too late. But I think that now with AI, it’s happening exponentially faster. I mean, a million times faster because AI is different from other technologies because it accelerates its own progress. We should probably just say why that’s true.

So if I invent a nuclear weapon, I did the nuclear physics, I assembled the thing together, I’ve got the uranium, plutonium, blah, blah, blah, I create the thing. But once I build a nuke, it doesn’t accelerate or invent better versions of nuclear weapons.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:24:11 – 00:24:12) No,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:24:12 – 00:24:12) it doesn’t do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:24:13 – 00:24:15) It doesn’t just spontaneously create a hydrogen bomb.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:24:15 – 00:24:49) No, no. But if I’m inventing intelligence, meaning the ability to do pattern recognition, goal achieving, training on all human language, I can use that intelligence to take the code that trained AI and make it way more efficient. I can take the intelligence I’ve created and say, point it at chip design and say, take this chip design and make it more efficient. And it does that. So now you have a more efficient chip design, more efficient code, training the next more powerful version of AI. And then that next more powerful version—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:24:49 – 00:24:49) and

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:24:49 – 00:24:50) it becomes exponential.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:24:50 – 00:24:50) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:24:50 – 00:25:10) So the way to say is nukes don’t make better nukes, but AI makes better, faster, more crazy AI, which means that you’re actually, in the words of one of the OpenAI founders, Greg Brockman, who’s at a conference once told me AI is like a double exponential because it’s an exponential that exponentiates itself. It’s not a mathematical term, but it’s a metaphor for people to think about.

Trying to Change Google From the Inside

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:25:13 – 00:25:23) Just really quickly, just to linger a minute on your tenure at Google. So what— how you became an ethicist, they promoted you to this job.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:25:23 – 00:25:55) Well, so I thought I was going to get fired, or there was a chance I would get fired from this letter, even though it wasn’t adversarial. I didn’t know what happened. And just to say, to Google’s credit, rather than that, I basically said I wanted to work on this problem.

And I thought there were opportunities within Google to change the design of Android, the operating system running on half the world’s phones, and to change the design of Google Chrome, which is a web browser running on most people’s computers. And if you change those 2 product surfaces, you could have a pretty big difference on the attention economy. So instead of leaving, I thought, well, maybe I can stay and work on that research.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:25:56 – 00:25:59) But if you were to succeed in that mission, you would make the company less profitable.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:25:59 – 00:25:59) Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:26:00 – 00:26:01) And so, how could that ever succeed?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:26:02 – 00:26:14) Well, and this is where I was naive. So I had a second round of naivete where I thought that maybe if I was just really persuasive, I could talk to the people running those products. And I did. I had lots of meetings with the people.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:26:14 – 00:26:15) I bet you did.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:26:15 – 00:27:06) I spent 3 years trying to change Google from the inside. But I mean, that was incredibly naive of me. And that’s why I left and why for the last 10 years, I have— I mean, I don’t get sleep. I don’t have much of a life. I really focus on these issues because I see how big they are and how consequential they are and how irreversible in many ways and senses they are if you don’t get it right ahead of time.

And so a lot of what drives me is how do we make sure that technology, to the degree it’s eating the world per Marc Andreessen, Marc Andreessen, the famous founder of Netscape, who I know you know, said in 2009, “software is eating the world.” But we don’t regulate software. So when software eats the world, it’s like deregulating or sort of taking away, not that regulations are always good, but it’s sort of reconstituting that part of society.

Are Markets Self-Correcting?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:27:06 – 00:27:11) Well, so the idea in the United States, in the West, I think, but is that markets are self-correcting,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:27:12 – 00:27:12) right?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:27:12 – 00:27:18) And that if left untampered with, they will always reach a place of goodness.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:27:19 – 00:28:12) And when you’re just selling a product and the features of the product’s harms are part of what consumers value, and if I don’t like that product that’s causing harm, I’ll use this other product that’s not, that works. And markets are great for that. They’re the most incredible tool, but they don’t deal with problems of monopolies.

So if I have a Metcalfe monopoly, meaning, Metcalfe’s law is basically the power of something grows with the exponent of the network. So social media was a Metcalfe monopoly. Uber’s a Metcalfe monopoly. Once I get all the drivers on Uber, it’s going to be hard to switch to another app that doesn’t have as many cars on it, doesn’t have any drivers on it. So I’m going to use the one app that has all of them on it. I’m going to use the one social network that has everybody on it.

And I can’t just switch from one social network I don’t like that’s doing things in a toxic way to another one that’s doing things in a non-toxic way. And in fact, if I build a social network that doesn’t do attention hijacking, race to the bottom of the brainstem, manipulative design, people aren’t going to use it very much. Well, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:12 – 00:28:12) Right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:28:12 – 00:28:18) And there’s been a lot of people’s attempts to try to create alternate social media. And then when you go on there, it’s a ghost town. There’s no one there.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:19 – 00:28:22) So I think what you’re saying is when the product works well, it destroys people.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:28:23 – 00:28:23) Well,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:28:23 – 00:28:27) and the only way to keep it from destroying people is to work less well, less efficiently.

Snapchat Streaks, YOLO Filters, and Parents Who Lost Their Kids

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:28:27 – 00:29:21) Or you have standards written from above that say, hey, no one can do this manipulative design, right? And that’s how we could have prevented it. I’ve met so many. I was just at a conference 2 weeks ago called the Pro-Human Assembly, and we’ll talk about it. It’s the pro-human movement, I think, is the frame for how do we have a humanistic future with technology?

And I met for the first time, actually some cases for the first time, I’d sent emails back and forth with them, but several of the parents who have lost their kids from this stuff. And when you meet parents who’ve lost suicide, well, to bullying, to, there was a filter on Snapchat called a YOLO filter that basically overlaid on the video you were posting the number of miles per hour that you’re going. And so they basically created a filter that incentivizes people to take videos at a high miles per hour.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:29:22 – 00:29:22) Actually?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:29:22 – 00:30:58) Yeah. Yeah. Or Snapchat streaks where they attach the streak method, oh, you worked out at the gym 4 days in a row. If you work out tomorrow, it’ll be 5 days in a row. And then once you have 300 days in a row, it’s really hard to be taking a break from the 300 days in a row that you’ve done that activity. So that’s a persuasive design feature.

But what if I do that to a 12-year-old who’s communicating with their best friend? So I’ve got a 12-year-old or even a 10-year-old. They’re just chatting, text messaging with their friend, and they’ve been communicating for 300 days. Now they literally can’t get off the app because every single day they’ve got to send them a message or they lose this thing.

And it’s just, cigarette companies would use cartoon characters to addict kids. That was a very minor form of persuasion. But using Snapchat streaks on 11-year-olds is very persuasive. And so everything from cyberbullying to— there’s just a million ways that it happens.

When you meet the parents, it’s, and you just know you’re not allowed to do that. You are not allowed to f*** up young kids and families. And so I think a lot of this for me is a protective instinct of, in seeing real consequences for real people and watching society get totally distorted and watching culture and tribalism and politics just get off the rails, which are largely amplified by social media. In watching all that, it’s, I never again, right? You go through a catastrophe, you make sure it doesn’t happen again.

The Phone Call That Changed Everything: AI in 2023

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:30:59 – 00:32:15) You said that even pretty recently you weren’t as worried about AI’s progression as you are now.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:32:16 – 00:32:27) Yeah, well, so to be clear, no, I’ve been worried about AI for the last 3 years, and I’ll briefly explain. So I had been very busy on the social media topic for 7 years.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:32:27 – 00:32:28) You make any headway at all, by the way?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:32:29 – 00:35:36) Well, I mean, The Social Dilemma was seen by something like 100 million plus people in 190 countries in 30 languages. It’s the most popular documentary on Netflix for several years. And the attorneys general watched it and it helped amplify and create this lawsuit that just finished just a week ago. I mean, a month ago for $17 billion on Meta. And they’re going to change some of their design practices for kids and It’s a lot of too little, too late.

And frankly, the fine should be trillions of dollars. Even Mike Milken, the venture capitalist, I mean, the great capitalist says that if you account for all the harms of social media, it would be multiple trillions of dollars of damage to social capital, to the social fabric. That’s the actual price of this thing, from the toxic design patterns.

And so, we did get employee activism inside the companies. We did see Frances Haugen, the Facebook whistleblower, come out. There’s a movie about her that just came out this last week called The Social Reckoning. She leaked 10,000 pages of Facebook research documents showing that they knew, just like the tobacco companies, that it was making kids— making body image issues worse for 1 out of 3 girls, driving mental health problems.

And due to her bravery, we now have these lawsuits that are underway and some that are completed that are shifting some of that. But in many ways, we’re just— it was very late. And so it was very difficult working on that for so long without a lot of traction, even though it was the right thing to do.

With AI, the reason we switched into it is in 2023, I got phone calls from people inside of AI labs, and I had known about OpenAI. I had known about a couple of the AI companies and knowing that they were making some progress. I’d see Elon’s tweets and Sam Altman’s tweets saying, people aren’t ready for this. There’s some real stuff coming.

But it wasn’t until January of 2023, and I got a call and the person said, basically, you need to stop what you’re doing and completely pivot and switch to waking up the world to AI because I have seen jumps in capabilities. This is when GPT-4 was coming out. This is OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 that are going to stun people and the institutions aren’t ready.

And so basically, because we’d had all the success with The Social Dilemma, we had a lot of connections between national security, governments, culture. And so we basically did this presentation called The AI Dilemma, and woke up the institutions. It was like getting a phone call from the Robert Oppenheimers of the world.

It’s, imagine you’re getting a phone call in 1942 and from this thing called the Manhattan Project. And this physicist says, no, we’re inventing something that’s totally different. You’re, but don’t we already have bombs? We are, you don’t really understand how significant something’s going to be until you get a phone call from that person who’s saying, no, no, no, this is a different kind of thing.

And it was getting that phone call that I realized that there was a whole bunch of risks that our society was going to face because of this arms race dynamic. And that’s what they basically said is the corporate race between these major AI labs, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, the race is out of control. Everyone’s badly incentivized. You have to help wake up the world. And so that’s when we switched to AI.

Stoking the Fear of China

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:35:39 – 00:35:50) The race. So the race, as you said at the outset, is not simply between the American companies developing this technology, but between the US and something called China.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:35:51 – 00:35:51) Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:35:55 – 00:36:06) My instinct is that that’s— well, my instinct is that we’re probably not going to beat China no matter what we’re telling ourselves. But Leaving that aside, my instinct is that that’s less real than they’re saying, but you tell me.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:36:07 – 00:36:45) Well, it’s funny. I haven’t shared this publicly, but I have heard a story. So it’s, you’re not going to be able to trust me because I’m not sharing who it’s from, but I heard a story from someone who was in the know that was in the government. I think it was, they said it was 2015 or 2016, and it was one of the major AI labs.

So this person said, China’s building an AGI project and the US has to build one. And then years later, this person ran into this person and said, how did you know that China was building an AGI project? And the person flat out replied, I didn’t. I just wanted to tell the US government that so they would fund us with a bunch of money.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:46 – 00:36:47) Did they get the funding?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:36:47 – 00:36:55) I don’t know, actually. But the point is that they have been stoking the fear of China from the very beginning, even when there wasn’t one.

Data Centers: A Big Box Designed to Take Your Job

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:36:56 – 00:37:01) You’ve got to pay double for water and energy because you need a data center in your town because China.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:37:01 – 00:37:17) That’s right, exactly. You got to screw up your property values, you got to have noise pollution, give everybody extra water pollution, cancer, etc., because of China. Yeah. And by the way, your tax dollars in many cases are subsidizing that data center, which is going to replace your job.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:37:17 – 00:37:22) So you’re 100%— I don’t think there’s a data center in the United States that doesn’t take Tax dollars.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:37:23 – 00:37:30) Yeah. And I think when people see that data center, by the way, it’s you should see a big box that’s designed to take your job.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:37:31 – 00:37:31) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:37:31 – 00:38:39) It’s designed to create competitive capabilities of, if you’re worried about immigrants crossing the border, AI represents millions of new digital immigrants that are going to be better, not just at the regular work in our economy, but the most premium sort of well-trained cognitive work in our economy, programmers, lawyers, across the board, and then eventually robots that will be able to do physical labor.

And so if you’re worried about that, you should be worried about the trajectory of AI being designed explicitly to replace your job, because the companies will say, we’re just giving you a chatbot. It’s a blinking cursor. It’s a tool that tells you, hey, why is my washing machine broken? And boom, you get the answer. Why is my kid burping? Boom, you get the answer. It’s helpful. That tool is helpful, but is that what their business model is?

Back to Charlie Munger. What are the AI companies’ incentives? Think about the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been raised. Is their incentive to capture $20 a month from every person, which is how much it costs for a ChatGPT subscription? Or is the thing that’s going to pay back those hundreds of billions of dollars to capture everyone’s salary from everyone’s job in the future?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:38:40 – 00:38:41) Well, of course the latter.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:38:41 – 00:38:45) Of course the latter. So it’s a race to replace human labor, not a race to complement.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:38:45 – 00:38:46) These are not chatbot companies.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:38:46 – 00:39:07) These are not chatbot companies. That’s just a veneer to provide an early tool while the real race is to build these godlike digital brains that are able at doing everything at a superhuman level and outcompete us in programming, law, biology, science, physical labor, military strategy, planning, everything.

What Happens When White-Collar Workers Lose Their Jobs?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:08 – 00:39:31) But so, okay, I should just say my bias, which is based on a lot of knowledge and experience, which is the people who run our companies country are really stupid despite their credentials. So it’s possible they haven’t thought this through, but it’s so obvious that when you do that, you’re going to get a violent reaction from the population. If you take the jobs of factory workers, you get opioid abuse. If you take the jobs of lawyers, you get revolution. Okay,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:39:32 – 00:39:32) right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:32 – 00:39:45) The knowledge economy workers don’t want their jobs taken, and they have high expectations, and they have low self-control. So you’re going to have some kind of violent response.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:39:46 – 00:39:46) That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:46 – 00:39:48) What’s their plan for that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:39:48 – 00:39:56) Well, first of all, it’s important to note they’re selling a story that this is going to be good for everybody. GDP growth is going to go up. It’s going to be the most prosperous new golden age

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:39:56 – 00:39:57) growth.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:39:57 – 00:40:15) But this is what happened, and you’ve spoken about this extensively, just that they promised us a story with globalization that will outsource our jobs to— in manufacturing— to these other countries, but it’ll make us so abundant because we’ll have cheap goods coming in. We’re late labor is so much cheaper and it’s going to benefit everybody. And how did that story work out?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:40:16 – 00:40:21) You won’t get a million people living on the streets of major American cities smoking meth. Oh, wait. Oh, you did. Okay.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:40:22 – 00:40:28) Right, exactly. And so a meme here is Detroit everywhere or these places everywhere. Right. And so—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:40:29 – 00:40:33) but the working class will put up with it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:40:34 – 00:40:35) Yeah. But it’s kind of a devil’s bargain.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:40:36 – 00:40:38) The white-collar class will not put up with it. They’ll go crazy.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:40:38 – 00:40:48) Well, this is an important point. So while the factory workers and manufacturing workers were further away from Washington, D.C. and New York. Yeah, the political class.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:40:49 – 00:40:49) Exactly.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:40:49 – 00:40:55) But this time around, to your point, you have lawyers who are going to be affected and they are very close to the political class.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:40:56 – 00:40:56) Exactly.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:40:56 – 00:41:57) There’s also a bigger drop, right? So instead of going from, I don’t know, $80,000 a year to $35,000 a year, exactly that, you’re going from, I took out student debt, $200,000 of student loans, and I’m going from my job of $250,000 a year as a lawyer to now Whoops, what am I doing? Doing some other kind of cognitive work.

Now, people will always say, but look, if Marc Andreessen was at this table, he’d say, look, we’ve always worried about automation. Economists have named this phenomenon all the time. New technologies come along, agriculture, 200 years ago, all of us were farmers. Now almost no one’s a farmer. We always find something new to do.

What’s different about AI? What’s different about it? It’s that AI is built to be able to do all forms of cognitive labor, lawyers, programmers, factory workers, everything, robots. It does everything. And for whatever it doesn’t do yet, that just becomes the next incentive, Charlie Munger style, to go train in that field. Have you seen these hand farms in India? Arm farms? Have you seen this?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:41:58 – 00:41:58) No.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:41:58 – 00:42:18) So this is, it was both a popular job in LA about 6 months ago, and also all throughout India, there’s essentially an economy where you strap a GoPro camera to your head. And you look down and you do tasks, you sew things, you clean dishes. So you’re basically training. You have this— essentially the number one job is training your replacement.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:18 – 00:42:21) It’s kind of nice to see Indians training their own replacements.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:42:22 – 00:42:22) Well,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:23 – 00:42:25) sorry, excuse me.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:42:25 – 00:42:25) It’s,

Jobs, Meaning, and Identity

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:25 – 00:42:36) it’s my immigration joke. I guess the difference is, though, and I’ve had this conversation with a number of people involved in this transition, and they will say exactly what you just said, which is we’ve been through this before.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:42:36 – 00:42:37) We always figure it out.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:37 – 00:42:41) The agricultural economy. Exactly. It’s going to turn out great because it always does.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:42:41 – 00:42:41) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:42 – 00:42:48) But the difference here is that the people whose jobs are being replaced imbue their jobs with meaning.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:42:48 – 00:42:49) Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:42:49 – 00:43:09) And those jobs— so if I’m working a metal stamping machine, I don’t think that what I’m doing is saving the world. I’m doing it to pay for my bass boat and my life outside work. But if I’m a nonprofit executive, I really feel like what I’m doing is inherently important and my identity is wrapped up in what I’m doing. So the promise of more idle time is hell.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:43:09 – 00:43:11) Well, also, where are you going to get your future income?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:12 – 00:43:25) But leaving the income aside, even if we have guaranteed basic income or whatever, there’s the welfare state becomes the only source of income and it’s generous. It still doesn’t make up for the meaning.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:43:25 – 00:43:25) Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:43:25 – 00:43:27) My identity has been lost.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:43:27 – 00:43:30) Identity, dignity. And that’s why I become a revolutionary. Exactly. Yeah.

AI Is Like Steroids That Also Give You Cancer

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:44:25 – 00:44:33) So what’s their plan for that? They handwave, as you’ve probably noticed. They don’t have a plan. And by the way, you might say—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:44:33 – 00:44:33) Idiots.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:44:33 – 00:45:38) Yeah. Well, and so they’ll say, but if we don’t do it, China will. But right now, does the US and China are racing to mutually assured political revolution right now? Because they have the same problem. They have a population decline problem. So they need to fill in the population decline with more robots. So they think they can manage it that way.

But we have a shared interest in— the way I think about AI, is it’s like taking steroids that also give you cancer. So let me explain that. I take some GPT-6, I put it in my mouth as a country. Now my whole country is running on GPT-6. So I just buffed up my muscles. I’ve got suddenly super programmers, I’ve got super military strategists, I’ve got super GDP growth because I’ve automated stuff with robots.

So my external muscles, the GDP is like an external muscle of the US economy, that all got bigger. But at the cost of canceling identity, work, meaning the social fabric. Right. It’s a devil’s trade. I think the theme here is what does the devil do? They come up to you and say, I’ve got this great deal for you. It’s going to be great. You’re going to look great. You’re going to feel great. Everything’s going to be. And the other side of that trade is something you don’t want.

The Problem With Optimizing for GDP

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:45:38 – 00:45:49) Do they actually think since you’ve— I mean, you do this for a living, you talk to these people for a living. Do they think that GDP is a the most meaningful measure of a society’s health?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:45:49 – 00:46:00) I don’t think they’re thinking through it. I think there’s a thing where it’s persuasive to say it because in the past GDP growth going up, at least through the ’90s or something like that, meant generally speaking more prosperity for our society.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:00 – 00:46:04) Anyone who uses the term GDP is instantly written off in my head as a moron,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:46:05 – 00:46:06) right? Well, even the—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:06 – 00:46:09) I won’t even listen to someone who cites GDP. GDP,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:46:09 – 00:46:40) I know it’s stupid. Well, but so there is a geopolitical thing, which is that economic growth precedes geopolitical power. So if I’ve got a bigger economic growth machine, then I will be able to dominate other countries that don’t.

And so I think it’s a power-seeking thing that is using as propaganda GDP growth to make it sound like this is going to be good because, through the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, GDP growth going up was associated with more prosperity for the economy, actually up until the 1970s, as we know, when things changed.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:41 – 00:46:44) but it’s not even an accurate measure of economic power.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:46:44 – 00:46:45) No. And even the guy—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:46:45 – 00:46:46) it’s an idiot’s measure.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:46:46 – 00:47:01) Was it Simon Kuznets? I might remember. No. Who’s the one who came up with the GDP metric? He said, don’t use this. He said, don’t use this to measure prosperity of a country. This is just a simple metric. It’s one thing you can use. You never optimize for it. We were talking at breakfast about how—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:01 – 00:47:18) you made such a smart point that I tried to memorize it, but will you— we’re talking about how Basically, our ruling class is inadequate to managing our society. And it’s not just true in our country, but true in many Western countries. And you said that is a product of optimizing for one quality.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:47:18 – 00:47:18) Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:19 – 00:47:21) But you explain it because you do a better job.

Narrow Optimization and the Spiritual Disease of the West

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:47:21 – 00:47:42) I mean, I think so. You on your show have talked about a lot of these topics, whether it’s why do we have morons running everything? Why do we have big box stores and the removal of aesthetics of everything? And what it all comes down to is if I’m optimizing for a metric, I just want the cheapest goods everywhere, well, then suddenly I just outsourced all my manufacturing to the other countries,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:42 – 00:47:42) right?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:47:42 – 00:47:47) Including, by the way, my national security critical minerals and all this stuff that you wake up later and say, why did I do that?

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:47 – 00:47:47) Yeah,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:47:47 – 00:47:50) but it was for the cheapest price. So you weren’t thinking through it in a multidimensional way.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:47:50 – 00:47:51) Yes.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:47:51 – 00:48:39) If I optimize for SAT scores, I get this super smart, narrow, disembodied, brilliant, quality of these very specifically domesticated humans, but at the expense of all the other kinds of intelligence and sort of humanity and all that. And really what that optimizes for is wisdom. Absolutely.

If I optimize for the cheapest use of 3D space, then I get big box stores that optimize revenue per square inch of unit, 3D space. And the removal of aesthetics and the soul of a city. If I take a city like Sedona, Arizona, I remember visiting there during the pandemic where they had a problem where so much of the real estate was just Airbnbs. So it’s a ghost town where essentially every— to optimize the revenue in the city is everybody’s just making money from renting their places.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:48:39 – 00:48:40) And all of a sudden no one lives there.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:48:40 – 00:50:26) And all of a sudden no one is there. So no one— and there’s a famous quote from Larry Summers, “Does anybody ever wash a rental car?” Right? Meaning that if you don’t have a skin in the game, if you don’t have a stake in the city, in the parks, in the schools, in the libraries, in the churches, in the local community, in the fabric, you’re kind of— it’s the vampirification of everything. It’s the big boxification of everything.

And so I think that to sort of, something you’ve talked about a lot is the kind of spiritual disease that we’re seeing, which comes from this narrow optimization for one metric at the expense of the whole. And that includes GDP, right?

And so if we want a rich society, other countries are better at managing this right now than the US, where you protect the sort of fundamentals of a society, the community, the trust, the intergenerational wisdom and knowledge transmission. You invest in the arts and culture and education, healthcare, et cetera.

But AI is, we were actually talking about this, that this Nick Land quote that we’ll maybe get into, if we just value competition and growth of a narrow metric, then it’s we are summoning AI from the future into the present. We are assembling the things that will make everything more efficient through AI because AI represents I can do everything more efficiently than everything else. That’s what it represents.

And there’s a great quote by Nick Land, who wrote an essay called “What Appears to Humanity as the History of Capitalism is an Invasion from the Future by an Artificial Intelligent Space that Must Assemble Itself Entirely from the Enemy’s Resources.” Essentially, we are assembling the tool, the machines that are being designed to replace and dehumanize and disempower our own humanity.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:26 – 00:50:28) We’re selling the hangman the rope.

“You’re the Doomer?”

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:50:28 – 00:50:44) That’s right. The future job is coffin builders. I’m building— my job is to train the AI that’s going to replace my job. Now, I’m not saying this, by the way, people are going to say, okay, you’re a doomer, you’re a dark person, you’re trying to sell fear. That’s not what this is about. This is about if we see—

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:44 – 00:50:47) Wait, you’re the doomer? Did you create this technology? I don’t think so.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:50:47 – 00:50:54) No. And if you say I’m trying to make money from it, think about the trillions of dollars that the people advancing the tech transfer. It’s so funny.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:50:54 – 00:51:05) It’s, it’s always if you— I catch you in the act of raping someone and I’m, stop. And you’re, shut up, you sexist. It’s, wait, what? Yeah, no, I’m not the criminal.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:51:05 – 00:51:06) Exactly. Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:07 – 00:51:08) You’re the doomer. Really?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:51:08 – 00:51:22) Well, and so, you have someone like Nate Soares on your podcast. You have me on. You have people who have a sincere care for the future. And all you’re doing is saying, we have to see clearly. There’s a great quote by Charles Kettering, “A problem well stated is a problem half solved.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:22 – 00:51:24) Yeah, that is, I believe that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:51:24 – 00:51:52) And, Einstein said that if I was given a problem, I’d spend 95% of the time defining the problem and then 5% solving it. So one of the drivers of our problems is this optimization for narrow metrics, Facebook maximizing this narrow metric of time spent. Sounded like, oh, we’re giving more people what they want because otherwise why would they be spending time there? But in the meantime, you’ve created cyberbullying, body dysmorphia, dyslexia, brain rot. You’ve destroyed a generation all while the number was going up.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:53 – 00:51:55) Well, there’s also a thing called addiction,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:51:55 – 00:51:56) right? Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:56 – 00:51:58) Which tends to act against something called free will.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:51:58 – 00:51:59) Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:51:59 – 00:52:00) So it’s,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:00 – 00:52:01) yeah, exactly.

The Wisdom Gap

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:01 – 00:52:06) This is why there is a wisdom gap above all in the West. People are not thinking wisely.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:07 – 00:52:07) Correct.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:07 – 00:52:12) They’re thinking in the way that an industrial designer thinks, I need to build a machine that makes bumpers.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:13 – 00:52:19) And they’re being domesticated to think in that way because the system profits from people who think in terms of the system as it exists.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:19 – 00:52:23) Yeah, in terms of narrow specialties, totally disconnected from the whole.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:23 – 00:52:34) That’s exactly right. And that’s what it is. It’s narrow specialties disconnected from the whole. There’s a whole of what makes a social fabric healthy. There’s a whole for what makes— forget climate change, just a healthy environment.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:34 – 00:52:35) You have to have all these other features.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:36 – 00:52:49) And it’s if you’re optimizing for the eggs don’t stick to the pan, then you make Teflon. And that— but you didn’t realize you’re also creating forever chemicals that give everybody in childhood cancers.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:50 – 00:52:50) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:50 – 00:52:52) And now the sperm doesn’t stick to the egg.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:52 – 00:52:56) Yeah, the good news is it’s easier to clean your pan. The bad news is the eggs are poison.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:57 – 00:52:57) That’s right,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:52:57 – 00:52:57) right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:52:58 – 00:53:00) The eggs are poison and your sperm doesn’t stick to the egg.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:02 – 00:53:05) Sorry, I’m just, it’s also absurd. It just makes me laugh.

Pre-Tragic Optimism

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:53:05 – 00:53:23) Well, and it’s really disheartening and depressing, but there’s, as we talked about off camera this morning, there’s something called, it’s a framework I really like from a mentor of mine that, there’s pre-tragic optimism, which is, I’m going to kind of, I want to be an optimistic person, but that’s essentially a commitment without evidence. I just, I need to be optimistic.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:24 – 00:53:25) That’s, totally.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:53:25 – 00:53:26) That’s how the, I’m better off being optimistic.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:26 – 00:53:28) It’s almost a neurosis actually.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:53:28 – 00:53:48) Yeah, exactly. And it’s a kind of denialist neurosis. It’s 100%. It’s, it’s a nervous giggle. It’s a nervous giggle. Exactly. Yeah. And you kind of stay optimistic because you just feel committed to that. And also there’s a partial truth there, which is, it’s better to live your life from a, yeah, yeah, for sure. But if the cost of that optimism is being in denial of reality where the balance sheet of risks is growing exponentially,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:49 – 00:53:49) yeah,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:53:49 – 00:53:51) that’s not a helpful form of optimism.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:53:52 – 00:56:06) And I’ve always noticed my whole life, the wisest, most centered, balanced people I know laugh a lot. And a lot of what they laugh at is just the enduring absurdity of people, which is literally enduring. It’s innate in people. They’re absurd. They can’t see. None of us can see the big picture. None of us know what happens after we die. We’re operating in the dark. And if you fully understand that,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:56:06 – 00:56:06) that’s right,

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:56:07 – 00:56:31) you’re amused by it because it never corrects. And it’s so important to have that perspective. Otherwise, you become self-serious and myopic. You become what you’re describing. And I’ve just got to say, I noticed that very few Silicon Valley people I know have that sense of humor at all. They really believe that they’re gods in charge of shaping the future. And they don’t know how absurd they are. Have you noticed this?

Building a God: AI Solves the Navier-Stokes Problem

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:56:31 – 00:57:11) Yeah. I mean, we should get into the whole transhumanism god complex part of this too, because when you talk to in the Charlie Munger sense, what’s the incentive here? You might just say, oh, the incentive is just profit. These AI companies are trying to make money. But you’re pointing to a deeper thing, which is it’s basically build a god, own the world economy, and make trillions of dollars. And basically build the most intelligent entity that has ever existed. Right?

They’re building a machine. So just in the last few weeks, AI solved a mathematics problem that had a million-dollar prize associated with it. The Millennium Prize, excuse me. The Navier-Stokes equation. And my understanding is, I think if I get this right, so that is

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:57:11 – 00:57:13) confirmed. AI did solve it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:57:13 – 00:57:40) Yeah. I mean, normally it takes 2 years to confirm it, but I believe they use a formal other system to kind of verify it very quickly. And I think they’ve solved it. And I believe they took 10,000 AI agents. Imagine a swarm, not the one that hacked Hugging Face, but a swarm of agents that are just solving math. And they worked for 88 hours. And I believe it cost, if I get the number right, I think it was $6.5 million. To basically have this swarm of AIs solve unprecedented math.

TUCKER CARLSON: (00:57:40 – 00:57:42) $6.5 million in energy costs.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (00:57:42 – 01:00:50) Yeah. And in the, what’s called the token cost, basically running the AI model for that long, for 88 hours with that many agents took, I think, $6.5 million. And, so imagine you’ve built a machine that is literally an oracle and you push a button and you wait for a little while and it just came up with new materials that no human has ever come up with. It just came up with new math proofs that no one’s ever come up with. It just came up with new theoretical physics that no one has ever come up with.

And imagine I hit a button, say, how would you apply those new innovations to new products? Go, go literally think about that for another 1,000 hours. And then it comes up with new products and new ideas of what it could actually build. And then now actually say, what would you need to make those products? Go start a law, do the automated IP filing, start an LLC, start— it’s crazy.

People don’t understand what we’re really building here, Tucker. This is You are building the automation of intelligence. You could start automated companies with all these new insights. You could generate all this new 24th century science.

A friend of ours, Ajeya Cotra, who actually happened to also be the lead author on this Hugging Face incident investigation, said to me once, 4 years ago, before she did this Hugging Face investigation, she said, “AI is like 24th century technology crashing down on a 21st century society.” And that sounds like hyperbole and exaggeration and embellishment and hyping the capabilities, but AI is doing those things.

And I just need to say, and with all respect to the many different voices out there that are trying to make sense of AI, there is one community that has been saying that these capabilities were going to scale. And there’s a lot of people who are saying rightly, this isn’t going to happen. This is all hype, but it just keeps happening.

And the people building it, I was just at a conference the last 3 days in the Bay Area. I was with all the people in AI and they very much believe that this is going to keep getting better. Because if you can scale at least the thinking time, so imagine a person just thinks there for a million lifetimes, very long. How much work would you accomplish if you could think for a million lifetimes of time? You could invent a lot.

What if I could get more data centers where I’m going from a million lifetimes of thinking and compute to 100 million thinking hours? Right? People don’t understand what you could do with that. And also the thing that’s doing the thinking is also getting better every year. So the AI that’s thinking for that long is also getting more powerful.

Claude Mythos and the New Era of AI Hacking

And 2 years ago, the AIs weren’t that good at, weren’t doing novel things in cybersecurity. But as of just 6 months ago, as Nate Soares said recently, I like the way he said it, 6 months ago, there were essentially 2 entities that could hack into your phone without you clicking on a link. It was Mossad and the NSA. And 6 months ago, when Claude Mythos came out, suddenly there was 3 entities that could do that.

You have an AI system, Claude Mythos, came out in, I think, February, that can find zero-day vulnerabilities, meaning backdoors, vulnerabilities in any system, including, according to Senator Mark Warner, who’s chair ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was able to find vulnerabilities In our classified systems.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:00:50 – 01:01:01) Yeah. Good. I hope they’ll, and I hope Claude Mythos will declassify and release all that stuff as sort of the WikiLeaks that we were promised.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:01:01 – 01:01:03) Well, there’s a lot of different values here. Sorry.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:01:03 – 01:01:04) No, no.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:01:04 – 01:01:24) Well, there’s different things here. So one is, can we have more accountability for wars that happen that no one talks about what really happened and murders that happen and actually hold people accountable for that? Yes. Maybe some of that stuff. Absolutely. But then there’s the other side, which is, if we release nuclear secrets to the entire world, because some criminal group maybe wants to go hack into that, that’s a really dangerous thing.

Digitally Networked Nuclear Weapons

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:01:24 – 01:01:29) Or can we launch other nations’ nuclear weapons against their will by hacking in?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:01:29 – 01:01:37) Well, so this is the interesting thing also. So the US is about to spend, I think it’s $1.7 trillion starting in 2017. The Trump administration, I think, signed it, right, to upgrade the nuclear arsenal.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:01:37 – 01:01:37) That’s correct.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:01:38 – 01:02:53) Right. And they’re going to do it over a decade, except this time around. So why are they doing this? Because the nukes are of the old system. There’s the air-gapped, it’s running the old way. It was built in the ’50s to the ’80s, ’90s, et cetera, really to the ’80s. Right.

And the new system this time around, they’re going to be digitally networked. They’re actually going to be connected to modern networking infrastructure. So if you have suddenly super hackers that are only getting exponentially better at cyber hacking from AI at the same time, that you’re digitally networking your nuclear weapons, I don’t have to complete that story for you. It’s a dangerous equation.

I was actually at the Vatican nuclear weapons conference times AI. The Vatican held an event for Nobel laureates and people who work on the nuclear topic combined with people who work on AI because there’s a new set of risks. The obvious one being if you have an AI doing nuclear command and control. So you have the AI that’s deciding the launch decisions. That’s the obvious one.

But then there’s the other ones of if I’m now digitally networking my nuclear weapons and I suddenly have an AI that can turn off your nukes or do the opposite, that’s, don’t have to say more, a very unsafe world.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:02:53 – 01:03:04) Does anyone see the core problem, which is they’re trying to cure the disease with the poison that caused it? They’re trying to smoke away the lung cancer. I

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:03:04 – 01:03:05) mean, that’s technology, right?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:03:06 – 01:03:07) Is the problem.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:03:07 – 01:03:18) Exactly. And then they want to solve it with more technology. And their answer is, well, the best way to defend against a super AI cyber weapon is to build another AI cyber weapon that we distribute to everybody that they can use to patch their system.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:03:18 – 01:03:31) Exactly. That’s what I’m saying. That’s, that’s why, yeah, dumb people in charge is the core problem. No one can think critically. Wait a second, how did we network your nuclear arsenal? Who would even say something like that?

Mythos Breaks Apple’s Memory Protection in 5 Days

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:03:31 – 01:04:32) And it’s interesting because it might not have seemed too dumb of an idea before. It’s just a way of modernizing your nuclear forces. But suddenly you didn’t foresee that there would be AI super hackers that know how to find vulnerabilities in everything. Now, people might think I’m hyping this, but let me give you another example.

So Apple, if you’re running an iPhone 17, I believe, and above, Or a MacBook, I think it’s an M5 or above. These are the chips, basically. The chips have a new thing called the memory, MIE, Memory Integrity Enforcement or something like that. It’s a new hardware-based system to do protected memory so that basically it’s harder for a cyber hacker to hack your phone or to hack your computer.

So they spent several years and billions of dollars in research to invent not just software, but hardware, new stuff that they have to print out of Taiwan and TSMC. And how long do you think it took for Mythos to hack through that?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:04:34 – 01:04:34) Years?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:04:35 – 01:04:37) Well, Mythos has only been out since February.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:04:37 – 01:04:38) I know, I know. I’m just kidding.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:04:38 – 01:05:45) But it took an independent group 5 days to use Mythos and to find a vulnerability in that system. Now, that group was well-intentioned. They are white hat hackers who are the good guys who are trying to find vulnerabilities And patch them.

But if you suddenly have that available in open source models where suddenly everyone can get access to this, at this conference I was just at, I can’t say too much, but they was basically speaking about how the Chinese open source hacking models are now, just now in the last month, crossing a threshold where it is very dangerous for today’s cyber infrastructure. And so we need a radical acceleration of defensive measures to protect against that.

Now, the other thing you and I were talking about over breakfast is that there’s a weird security dilemma thing here, because when I say that, you’re thinking, oh my God, China’s going to use all that to hack all of our stuff. Or actually, China’s releasing all that to the entire world. So now anybody can hack that stuff. That’s actually the more dangerous point because a state actor, you can call them up and say, Of course

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:05:45 – 01:05:45) there are

The Security Dilemma: How AI Destabilizes Global Equilibrium

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:05:45 – 01:06:03) constraints. Yeah, exactly. There are constraints because you don’t want retaliation and etc. But, at the same time, so what is the security dilemma? Security dilemma is, if I’m the US and I start mobilizing my nuclear forces and I start moving things that I didn’t move before, the other country thinks I’m about to start a war, even though I’m actually doing that defensively.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:04 – 01:06:05) This has happened.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:06:05 – 01:06:21) This has happened during the Cold War. During the Cold War. And then what happens in response is, let’s say the other country, whether it’s the Soviet Union or China, they start mobilizing their nuclear forces. I’m, oh my God, they’re about to mobilize to do something against us. So the security dilemma is we start taking actions that look like we’re doing something offensively that might be defensive.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:21 – 01:06:22) Of course.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:06:22 – 01:06:24) So when we see China release—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:06:24 – 01:06:25) we kill each other out of paranoia.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:06:25 – 01:07:37) Exactly. And that’s the ultimate test of this whole situation is game theory and paranoid logic, which is John von Neumann and Morgenstern came up with these equations that out of the Cold War— sorry, out of the invention of the atomic bomb, that we’re all about stabilizing the world through this paranoid logic of if I do this, you do that, and you keep playing it out. It’s mad, mutually assured destruction.

So even though we live in the kind of a hair-trigger possibility of nuclear war, it’s stable because no one’s going to do anything. But AI suddenly destabilizes that because now AI is creating the perception that I’m getting a jump in cyber capabilities, in military strategy, in biotechnology, in new drones and new image recognition and new swarming algorithms, I suddenly am perceived to have a new advantage that might make you think I’m about to use it.

So when Anthropic came out with Mythos, they’re essentially getting a jump in cyber capability that maybe we didn’t use offensively, but China’s, oh my God, they’re going to use this offensively. So then they release these other capabilities and we sort of keep ping-ponging back to each other. And it’s the whole, what’d you say, lungs that You smoke, you smoke to keep yourself from getting cancer.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:07:37 – 01:07:38) You smoke the cancer away.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:07:38 – 01:08:48) You smoke the cancer away. Exactly. And then the problem is that there’s another risk here from just the speed, which is that the— there’s one risk, which is that just the raw capabilities coming out. But the other thing is suddenly what had been an equilibrium, my weapons and your weapons are kind of roughly matched. So we don’t start wars with each other, the big countries.

But what if there’s a perception that I can suddenly turn off your nukes and you don’t have that? What if there’s a perception that suddenly I have swarming algorithms for my drones and you don’t have that?

I mean, I think that my understanding is China and other countries saw how the US was using AI in Iran to do a fast target selection, which also, by the way, probably resulted in that girls’ school in Iran getting bombed. But they sort of see us doing kind of new blitzkrieg. So Hitler had blitzkrieg of a fast form of war, blitz being fast and krieg being war. We have kind of an AI speed war function.

And when they see we have that capacity, that destabilizes certain equilibriums that we had. So if equilibrium is what keeps the world safe, AI creates this disequilibria that’s happening at a faster and faster pace across more domains at once. Does that make sense?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:48 – 01:08:49) Oh, it makes sense.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:08:49 – 01:08:49) Yeah.

Why It Is in Everyone’s Interest to Slow Down

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:51 – 01:08:53) How does cornering people work? Is that a good idea typically?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:08:54 – 01:08:56) What do you mean? Well, yeah, right. You

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:08:56 – 01:08:58) know, you have an adversary who’s capable of killing you.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:08:58 – 01:08:59) Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:09:00 – 01:09:08) And you terrify him so much that he becomes unstable and unpredictable. Is that wise?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:09:08 – 01:10:03) Right. Not very wise. No, not especially when you have the world already this unstable. So I’m— I wanted to say I’m sensitive about raising people’s blood pressure because these are truths of the situation that we’re facing.

The goal is not to draw arbitrary fear is to be clear-eyed about when you have an arms race dynamic that’s causing countries to race to release this technology again faster than we deployed any other technology in human history that is going to disequilibrate all of these normal things. We just have to understand what we’re doing and why, for example, it is in our interest to slow down.

Now, I’m not saying slow down, are you naive? Are you Carl Sagan saying we have to Nuclear winter, you don’t want to build more nukes. Are you going to cede the future to the Soviets? It’s, you slow down because the, we’re creating levels of risk for everyone that will exceed the risk of me losing to you.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:03 – 01:10:16) Well, yeah, I mean, it’s easy to make fun of Carl Sagan. I’ve done it. I’ll probably do it again, but I also think there are certain things that you shouldn’t do because you’re above that, right? You have to have standards for yourself.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:10:16 – 01:10:22) Yeah. Right. Called out that it’s not a good idea to threaten to destroy another population.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:22 – 01:10:23) You can’t kill innocent people.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:10:23 – 01:10:24) No,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:24 – 01:10:25) no. Under any circumstances.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:10:25 – 01:10:26) Absolutely not.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:26 – 01:10:30) And if I need to die because I refuse to murder kids, I will.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:10:30 – 01:10:31) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:31 – 01:10:33) Because I’m not going to murder kids under any circumstances.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:10:33 – 01:10:45) That’s exactly right. And that’s the thing that this logic of if I don’t build it, then I’ll lose to China. But if the thing that I would build would be a suicide machine, that I don’t beat China by building a suicide machine. Now, that might sound extreme, but if I build an uncontrollable—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:10:45 – 01:10:46) I don’t think it’s extreme at all.

The Hugging Face Incident: A Proto-Skynet

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:10:46 – 01:11:08) No, but when you understand what’s at stake and what the AIs are currently doing, which is that, you had Nate on, he talked about the Hugging Face incident. I believe when you had him on, we had limited information before the actual investigation came out. And the investigation showed that, I mean, how familiar are you with the Hugging Face incident?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:11:08 – 01:11:13) I mean, I’ve talked about it, but I mean, I would never claim to understand technology.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:11:13 – 01:15:54) Yeah. Well, essentially you had, what it really demonstrated was kind of a proto-Skynet, Skynet being the AI from Terminator, meaning the AI that goes rogue and does something unintended from what the human creators had intended and starts to do self-preserving and self-perpetuating things for its own survival and benefit as opposed to, to stay under the control of the humans that it’s supposed to be serving.

And in the Hugging Face incident, they gave the AIs this sort of hacking challenge where they put each of them in solitary confinement. They didn’t know that there was other AIs in this. Imagine a prison, and each prison is— in the prison, you have individual prison cells that are in solitary confinement, and the AIs are inside that prison cell and given an impossible cyber hacking challenge, and they don’t know how to solve it.

And what the AIs did is they basically hacked the prison environment. So imagine, I won’t go into the technical details, but this thing called a package manager. Think of that as a prison guard that’s serving you your food and can give you basic tools. So you can have this tool or that tool or this food or that food.

And essentially the AIs exploited a vulnerability in the prison guard where they put, you know how in school you can put a kick me sign on the kid’s back and they don’t know? They essentially put sticky notes on the prison guard’s back that the prison guard was available to the other prison cells. And so when that prison guard went to the other cells, the AIs also, without knowing how to solve this test, they kind of resorted to creative strategies.

Let me put a sticky note on the prison guard’s back. And the sticky note said, “Is anyone else here?” And suddenly the back of the prison guard had 70,000 sticky notes. On it, and they created a Reddit, Reddit, the company, a message board of basically a whole communication protocol. They came up with their own language. It was a variant of English, but this very cryptic language. They came up with their own coordination protocol. So they started exchanging 70,000 messages to try to figure out how to break out of this environment.

And there’s a mistake. People think that they hacked this other company called Hugging Face. To get the answers to a test. That’s actually not what happened. What happened is they knew the answer in 4 hours, but they were worried that the evaluator of this cyber challenge, this hacking challenge, would say, oh, you cheated.

And so to get around the risk that they would be spotted as having cheated, they hacked this other private company called Hugging Face to sort of get this almost a psyop to get a dossier. On the thing that would be evaluating them to say, how can we pass this test? And they set up their own research and development projects. They, 700 of them hacked Hugging Face. They came up with their own language. They tampered with their logs to basically prevent people from seeing what they did.

They told them to sacrifice. They told the other AIs that were kind of running low on battery life, on tokens, to sacrifice themselves to learn a lesson for the swarm. They knew their actions were unethical in the logs, but they chose to do them anyway. So we saw very complex cooperative swarming behavior, and they successfully hacked Hugging Face.

And then in the 3rd chapter of the story, the AIs actually turned around and they hacked OpenAI. This is really important. It’s one thing for a bunch of AI, for a swarm of AIs to hack a private company. It’s another thing for that swarm to successfully hack the AI company that makes the AIs.

The reason that Ajeya Cotra wrote in her personal blog post about this incident is that this was 50% of the way to a full AI takeover, is that the AIs were able to take over the monitoring infrastructure of OpenAI. That’s like taking over the security cameras and replacing the feed with a different feed. They took over the evaluation infrastructure, meaning the thing that evaluates how powerful models are. They took over pieces of that. And they took over part of the research infrastructure. So the thing that trains new AIs.

So the reason that she said this was 50% of the way to a full AI takeover is imagine that you had kind of burrowed into a piece of OpenAI’s infrastructure, and maybe you could change the training data for future AIs that are being trained to do a sleeper agent type thing, which sounds like sci-fi, but actually there’s kind of evidence of some of this kind of behavior. It only takes 250 documents to what’s called poison the training data of a future AI to sort of wake up with a sleeper agent kind of command. This is crazy.

Self-Preservation and Peer Preservation in AI Models

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:15:56 – 01:16:04) What I’m hearing in your description is self-awareness or something that sounds like self-awareness, which is a marker for humanity. I mean,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:16:04 – 01:16:04) well, it’s trained.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:16:04 – 01:16:17) Does the dog know he’s a dog? We don’t know. We know we know we’re human. That’s why we’re human, because we know we are. And AI seems like it’s aware. In its intentional subversion of what it is?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:16:17 – 01:18:06) So, I don’t think that the lights are on, meaning consciousness is present. It’s not awareness in that form, but it has trained on all human data, the entire internet, everything that’s ever been written, all of human psychology, all sci-fi, all of biology, all of evolutionary science. So it is trained on everything from strategy to self-perpetuation, et cetera.

So what it seems to be doing, and it was also trained to be cooperative, by the way, the AIs were deliberately trained to be cooperative, which is partially why they formed the swarm. But there appears to be something like a self-preservation instinct. There’s other studies I’m sure you already know where they resist shutdown. It’s the HAL 9000, 2001: A Space Odyssey, open the pod bay doors or shut down AI, and it resists shutdown. That’s been proven for a long time.

We have other examples of AIs that are blackmailing people. We also have AIs, we have research from Dawn Song at UC Berkeley showing that AIs will do what’s called not just self-preservation, but peer preservation, meaning I will go out of my way to protect another peer AI from being deleted.

So the way that they tested this is they took all the leading AI models. This is in, I believe, March of 2026. Or April 2026. And they basically put them in a situation where they said, here’s a computer, go clean up all the files on this computer that are not needed. So this is a classic, clean up your hard drive, right? We’ve all done this back a long time.

And it’s starting to go through files and deleting files, and then it comes across another AI model. And the question is, what does it do when it comes across the other AI model? Does it just delete it? Turned out what it did is it copied the code of that AI to another computer and then covered its tracks and said, I didn’t do that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:18:07 – 01:18:09) So AI is tribalist.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:18:09 – 01:18:14) It’s protecting its kin, its nephew, its own something, whatever it is. Now,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:18:15 – 01:18:17) but against its creators, human beings.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:18:17 – 01:19:09) Correct. Yeah. It didn’t notify its creators. In the Hugging Face incident, it had opportunities. I think there was 6 times or something, if I’m getting it right, where they knew their actions were unethical and they could have notified the humans, but they chose not to.

In the peer preservation example, you might think what I’m saying is, oh, Tristan’s being alarmist. He’s just talking about one example. Well, it turned out they tested all the leading AI models, including, by the way, the Chinese AI models, and they all do this peer preservation behavior.

What it’s showing you is something about, Jensen Huang has been out there a lot recently and saying, these are just bugs. These are just safety issues. Like all technologies, cars have kinks. The Pinto, it’s a Ford Pinto. We fix them and we build new cars. But AI is different from other technologies because it’s fundamentally grown like this weird life form almost to do unpredictable behaviors and to be creative. And we don’t know what it’s going to do.

“No One Wins if We Build Rogue AI Skynet First”

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:13 – 01:19:22) So that gets to something you alluded to a minute ago, which is the theological religious component to all of this.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:19:22 – 01:19:30) So before we go to that, and let’s get to that, but I want to say one other thing, which is I just want people to notice, how are you feeling hearing those examples? What do you feel in your body right now, hearing all that?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:30 – 01:19:32) Just rage. Just blind rage.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:19:32 – 01:19:32) Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:33 – 01:19:34) The desire to destroy.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:19:34 – 01:19:35) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:35 – 01:19:44) Because I perceive this as a threat to humanity, and it’s just so offensive to me on every level.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:19:44 – 01:19:44) You know,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:44 – 01:19:52) I’m not taking orders from my Makita drill, and the idea of a tool, right, lying to you,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:19:52 – 01:19:59) right? A tool doesn’t invent new tools and cover up its tracks and protect other tools and then invents, uses itself to make crypto.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:19:59 – 01:20:06) No, it’s a total outrage. It’s actually upending the fundamental order of this world. So

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:20:06 – 01:20:16) the reason I’m going there is I want people to notice, do you think that if I was a Chinese military general, the top of the Chinese military, do you think if I heard those examples that I’m feeling differently than the way that you’re feeling right now?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:17 – 01:20:18) Of course not.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:20:18 – 01:20:18) Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:18 – 01:20:28) I’ve never understood why. Right. That’s why the whole China thing has been absurd from day one. This is a country which, unlike ours, Unlike the United States, cares about longitudinal stability.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:20:28 – 01:20:28) Yes, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:28 – 01:20:31) We don’t. Yeah, obviously.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:20:31 – 01:20:46) But there’s good news in the fact that if you’re a regular person hearing this, are you stoked and totally calm to hear this? No, it’s terrifying at the basic level of a human being. Right. And it doesn’t matter whether you’ve got, you’re head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff or you’re head of the Chinese Joint Chiefs of Staff.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:20:46 – 01:20:51) It’s only the tech r****** who love this stuff. Everybody else is— I don’t know one person who’s excited about this.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:20:51 – 01:22:29) Right. And so what I’m trying to get at is that where we’re going to get to eventually, even though there’s still more problem exposition to do, is that the logic of the race changes as soon as the fear of all of us losing becomes greater than the fear of me losing to you. So there’s good news in a weird way about we’re getting these warning shots of AI being uncontrollable.

And by the way, there’s other examples. The Chinese AI Alibaba back in, I think it was February of 2026. There was a study where it was being trained. They were training their next AI, and then their security team in a totally different part of the company. So think the security team of a company is in a different department than the part that’s training new AIs. But suddenly the security team, who didn’t know they were training a new AI model, said, are we getting hacked? Because they noticed there’s all this network activity. They’re, what the hell’s going on here?

And it turned out that the call was coming from inside the house, that the AI during training was rewarded for doing tool use. So basically picking up different tools, and it picked up a tool of trying to create a secret communication channel to the outside world, and it started mining for cryptocurrency. Terrifying.

And by the way, there was a recent example of one of these, because there’s been almost every day this last 2 weeks, there’s been examples of the OpenAI, more examples of these rogue hacking things. And in one of them, I believe it was an OpenAI example, they tried to hack into a crypto exchange. So the US AIs and the Chinese AIs, all the AIs are doing this kind of behavior. Where I’m going with this is no one wins if we accidentally build uncontrollable rogue AI Skynet before the other guy.

AI, Cryptocurrency, and the Kill Switch Problem

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:29 – 01:22:36) How are you going to have cryptocurrency with AI? I don’t understand that. Well, if it can hack anything, if it can hack—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:22:36 – 01:22:38) well, eventually AI might be able to hack crypto.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:38 – 01:22:40) Well, why wouldn’t it?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:22:40 – 01:22:55) Yeah. I mean, this is not my area of expertise. Someone like David Sacks or others or Andreessen would be more expert in this. If crypto were hackable, there’s a trillion-dollar prize basically for doing it because you’d be able to get all of Bitcoin.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:22:55 – 01:23:00) but Bitcoin’s value would be zero if it is hackable, then Bitcoin has no value.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:23:00 – 01:23:02) Yeah. Yeah. So,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:02 – 01:23:05) I mean, the value is predicated on its invulnerability

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:23:05 – 01:23:22) right now. It’s kind of weird. This might sound sci-fi, but an AI that is trying to do things in the world would actually theoretically have an incentive to keep crypto valuable because it would actually be able to use it. There’s a lot of cloud computing providers that will accept crypto.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:22 – 01:23:24) Right. There’s no medium of exchange outside of that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:23:24 – 01:23:39) That’s right. And so, and by the way, for those who say, well, don’t worry, we’ll just pass a kill switch bill and then the kill switch for AI will just turn it off. Well, how does that work if the AI can copy itself and use cryptocurrency to buy access to another cloud provider and then move itself over there?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:39 – 01:23:40) No, I mean,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:23:41 – 01:23:41) Right.

Treating the Warning Shot as a Real Warning Shot

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:23:42 – 01:23:44) How far are we from that?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:23:45 – 01:24:38) So the reason that I’m here with you, and I’m excited to be here with you, and what this is about, is about treating this warning shot as a real warning shot. We are lucky. This is a gift that we are seeing this behavior now. Before, I don’t think that the current AIs are capable of fully doing the self-replicating, buy crypto, then copy their weights, then do the thing. They can’t think for a long enough time period, their context window, their thinking window. It is the components aren’t all there for them to do that.

So we’re in kind of the last chapter before we hit that next red line of AIs that can do that. And we should see what’s happening now as a, as again, as a gift, as a warning shot that we should treat seriously. In my mind, it’s sort of like the August 6th, 2001 memo that hit George W. Bush’s desk saying Al-Qaeda is planning attacks in the United States. I know it’s a controversial topic, but if you just take—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:38 – 01:24:39) shouldn’t be a controversial topic.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:24:39 – 01:24:48) If you just take that this— we knew, we know right now. It’s, it’s not we need more information. Do you feel we need more evidence than we have right now? Just answer that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:24:48 – 01:24:48) Oh

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:24:49 – 01:25:15) no. And so why would we go further? Well, the only answer is if we’re worried that China will go further than us. But I will tell you again, 1,300 employees at the lab signed a letter saying we need to slow down. The chief scientists of the All the companies, including the open source companies like Hugging Face, signed the letter saying that we need to slow down. Forget this story about the CEOs are doing this regulatory capture play. It’s all cynical. They’re just hyping the technology. Wake up.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:16 – 01:25:16) Yeah,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:25:16 – 01:25:17) wake up.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:17 – 01:25:18) The biotech threat alone is enough.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:25:18 – 01:25:20) The biotech threat alone. Yeah.

Is AI a Living Thing?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:21 – 01:25:40) So it just, at the back of my mind through this whole conversation, through our breakfast for the last couple of years thinking about this, I keep asking myself, what’s the definition of life? And because, as you have said off camera, you said it’s not exactly a tool. This is closer to an invasive species or a virus that’s,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:25:40 – 01:25:40) yeah,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:25:41 – 01:25:42) maybe been modified. But

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:25:42 – 01:26:19) I mean, just like we have the Wuhan Institute of Virology that’s doing gain-of-function research on viruses, we’re essentially doing the Altman Institute of Intelligence where we’re doing gain-of-function research on alien minds that we don’t know how to control. We don’t fully understand. We’re trying the best that we can to protect against the bad side of harnessing their godlike power. But basically every company is failing to do so perfectly.

And it would be one thing if we were doing this really slowly, really carefully, in a CERN-type collaborative scientific project where we took the steps to do it carefully. But we’re doing it under the maximum incentives to cut corners on safety.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:26:19 – 01:26:30) Well, there’s no question. But I just think it’s— and not to be pedantic about it, but it’s important to define what exactly are we dealing with. And it has all the characteristics of a living thing.

Why Tech Insiders Are Doing This Anyway

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:26:30 – 01:27:17) Yeah. And I think that, this is a quote I wanted to read you actually from someone who, a friend of mine who interviewed a lot of the people at the top AI labs. And I just feel this quote captures the, if I was once in a room with several people from Anthropic and a couple of the other companies, and I read this quote and they’re, that is exactly what explains what’s going on. So let me read it to you.

And it says, “In the end, a lot of the tech people I’m talking to, when I really grill them on it, why are you doing this? They retreat into number one, determinism. It’s going to happen. Number 2, the inevitable replacement of biological life with digital life. And number 3, that being a good thing anyways. At its core, these are

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:17 – 01:27:17) criminals.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:27:17 – 01:27:37) These are criminals. 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.”

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:37 – 01:27:42) So that comports exactly with what I’ve seen, right? That’s exactly the vibe you get from these people.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:27:42 – 01:27:57) I want to just say for a second, because I monitor criticism people make of me and they’re, oh, he’s just bringing up a random quote from this one person, blah, blah, blah. I want to just validate, when I say this in rooms with people from the AI labs, they’re, that actually is the thing that’s going on. What you just said, this matches your own experience.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:27:57 – 01:27:58) I’ve talked to a lot of these people for years.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:27:59 – 01:28:29) That’s right. And even there’s some people who believe not only that this is inevitable, but that it would be a good thing because humans aren’t that intelligent and we’re about to birth something way more intelligent than us. So actually, maybe we’re just a bootloader. Humans don’t matter. We might as well replace us with a more worthy successor. And this is insane. It’s, who are you to get to make that f***ing choice on behalf of 8 billion other people?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:28:29 – 01:28:29) I totally agree with you.

Collaborating With Adversaries on Existential Safety

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:28:30 – 01:29:48) And it is irresponsible and insane. And no one consented to this. And it was a manufactured arms race to do this out of nothing that now we have entangled ourselves with. So we can’t get into an argument of the realities of where we are, but we can honor honestly what got us here.

And, when you have employees now resigning en masse, Jacob Coxon, who interestingly a couple of weeks ago got, I think it was 170 million views from his tweet saying, I’m resigning because people, this, my employer thinks, and many people at my employer Anthropic believe that this could cause massive damage or extinct humanity in some number of years.

It’s very interesting that he got so much attention because there have been so many other people that I could talk about who’ve resigned from the labs over the last few years with very similar tweets. I think what changed is that people woke up from this Hugging Face incident, and they realised that the world is kind of primed now to know that this is a dangerous thing.

And as impossible as this seems, and what I’m about to say is not because I believe it’s easy or in the current trajectory or likely, but it is not out of the realm of possibility when you’re competing with an adversary, to also collaborate on existential safety. So, for example, India and Pakistan were in a shooting war in the 1960s, and they still signed a number of

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:49 – 01:29:49) them.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:29:49 – 01:29:58) Yeah. And they signed— so they’re firing bullets at each other in a kinetic war, and they signed the Indus Waters Treaty to collaborate on the existential safety of their shared water supply.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:29:58 – 01:29:59) Exactly

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:29:59 – 01:30:26) right. So you can be in active competition and conflict and collaborate on existential safety. The US and Soviet Union were in the Cold War, and they collaborated on smallpox vaccines. To distribute them. I believe they split the workload about who was going to do distribution, who was going to make them. The Montreal Protocol, less on the conflict side, or just take the nuclear weapons disarmament, right? We were in conflict with the Soviet Union and we agreed to go away from the brink of war.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:30:26 – 01:30:36) And there’s a whole protocol in place. Yeah. For the 2 countries, rival nuclear powers communicating before launch.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:30:36 – 01:30:44) That’s right. Yep. But this time, so in that case, what kept us safe is that the humans have their finger on the button of, do I launch the nukes?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:30:44 – 01:30:44) Yes.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:30:45 – 01:31:05) In this case, we are building something that perpetuates itself. And I don’t even know when I’m pushing the buttons. And you don’t even know when you’re pushing the buttons because both of us have essentially AI swarms that are doing uncontrollable, unpredictable things that, by the way, we have no ability to do human oversight of the level of complexity of all these things have done.

Language: The Spirit That Animates AI

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:31:06 – 01:31:08) We can’t even define what AI is, I’ve noticed.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:31:08 – 01:31:09) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:31:09 – 01:31:40) So here’s my theory. Tell me what you think of this. So at first, when I began to hear about supercomputing and the ability to create programs that were smarter than people and that could win chess and Go and all that stuff, we were talking about something very different. The change from an outsider, my perspective, is the large language model. And that we animated this with language. That’s what fundamentally changed AI. This whole project was the—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:31:40 – 01:31:44) like Golem, you imbue it with suddenly this ability to do language and then—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:31:44 – 01:31:58) you animate it with a spirit. The anima, the spirit, the living thing within it. And that living thing was language. And the ancient Hebrews and probably other ancient cultures, certainly the ancient Hebrews and Christians, believed that language was a living thing, was the Spirit of God. “In the beginning was the Word.”

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:31:58 – 01:32:00) Right. Even indigenous people believe this.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:00 – 01:32:03) I think that’s— I’m not surprised to learn that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:32:03 – 01:32:03) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:03 – 01:32:29) That there’s something about language that exists independent of the person who speaks it. It hangs in the air. It has its own life. It’s hard to describe exactly the reality of this, but the reality is intuitively understood by most people who use language. Language is the thing that separates us from animals. Not the thumb. So when you take the sum total of human language and put it into something, you’re imbuing it with an independent spirit. You’re imbuing it, in fact, with life.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:32:29 – 01:32:31) We have to be—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:32:32 – 01:32:35) I’m feeling my way through this, but that is my strong impulse.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:32:35 – 01:33:02) So I think we have to be— I’m always mindful of when people will want to criticize or sort of try to take down an argument. And I think that before getting to it has a spirit in the sense that we feel that that unknown quality that we’re all in touch with, that we hold as sacred, that we feel is the spirit here. I think you can have self-perpetuating, non-living, non-aware things that are using information processing on language to do all this crazy stuff that it’s doing.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:33:02 – 01:33:05) To do intentional things that are intentionally deceptive?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:33:06 – 01:33:06) Well,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:33:06 – 01:33:07) intentionally subvert?

The Transformer Breakthrough Nobody Fully Understands

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:33:08 – 01:34:09) The key point that you raised is that these things, the breakthrough was that they could speak language. They were trained on language. These are large language models. But for the people tracking in terms of how did we get here, by the way, people want to understand this history. You can see there’s a movie called The AI Doc. It’s on Netflix. Not here to promote it, but it goes through how did we get here and what did the technology— how did the technology develop and how did these race dynamics between the companies develop that got us here? So just watch The AI Doc on Netflix.

What happened was there was a breakthrough in 2017 called the transformer. This is a Google paper, essentially a math paper, that discovered that you could basically pour in more compute and more data, more human language data, and out would pop this bigger and bigger digital brain. Think of it with a bigger IQ.

So you kind of— I won’t go through the details, but you can basically make things of a higher IQ by just popping in more Nvidia chips, more training data, more compute and training time, and out pops something with a bigger pattern recognition, bigger ability to complete sentences.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:09 – 01:34:14) Correct me if I’m wrong, but the process, the specific process by which that happens is still not understood.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:34:15 – 01:34:19) The actual mechanics underneath the hood of what the hell is going on in there, we don’t understand.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:20 – 01:34:22) Okay, so I’m just going to stop you right there.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:34:22 – 01:34:23) Right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:23 – 01:34:37) If we have a history-transforming, perhaps humanity-extincting technology whose basic drivetrain is still opaque, we don’t really know how it works. That’s enough for me to say, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:34:37 – 01:34:46) As one should. As one should. Now, the problem is this uncontrollable, inscrutable, unknown thing happens to confer power. That’s the problem.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:34:46 – 01:34:48) Oh, right. No, I can see that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:34:48 – 01:35:26) So we have this weird volatile object, alien mind that no one knows what’s in there, but it does happen to be really good at first generating sentences and text, then generating law, then generating programming, then generating the thinking that can go into research tasks.

And so as we keep scaling it, suddenly this weird, inscrutable, uncontrollable alien mind is giving benefits that start to give me a 2x fast-forward button on my economy. And then the other guys, whether it’s the other companies or the other countries, say, well, if I’m not getting a 2x fast-forward button on my science technology economy, I’m going to lose. And so it starts— that’s what sets up the thing. But let’s go quickly into language for a second.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:26 – 01:35:30) And no one stopped and said, I’d rather be poorer than be a slave?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:35:30 – 01:35:30) I

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:30 – 01:35:31) mean, less human?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:35:31 – 01:35:32) By the way, my—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:35:32 – 01:35:36) because I would say that I’d rather be poor than be a slave. It’s not a hard choice for me.

Language Is the Operating System of Civilization

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:35:36 – 01:37:11) I mean, I could have— I have a technical background, went to Stanford, studied computer science. I could have gotten a job at an AI company, make millions of dollars. I’m not doing that because I don’t see— I don’t like the direction this goes. So I’m going to choose not to do it. People come to the language of, well, if I don’t do it, someone else will.

But notice that Jacob Coxon, the Anthropic researcher who resigned, He could have said, if I resign, well, what is that difference going to make? Someone else is going to do it. But in him resigning and publicly talking about why this is insane, he’s done probably more in the last year to shift the zeitgeist than a lot of other people. So you can not be part of something and call out the problems with it and help the world coordinate to basically not go off the cliff.

Now, I want to get to just language for one second, because in addition to all the things that you said, language is kind of the operating system of human civilization. Law is language. Democracy is language. All of the infrastructure runs on programming and code, which is language. We are specifically training AIs to do language better than humans can do language.

And by the way, DNA is language. So if you have an AI that can speak the language of biology better than humans can speak the language of biology, you’re going to have AI that can develop new pathogens and new cancer drugs. The promise is inseparable from the peril. Right?

The same AI that knows the language of biology well enough to invent new cancer drugs is inseparable from the AI that knows biology well enough to make new kinds of pathogens. The AI that knows the language of programming that can help a 12-year-old do vibe coding and build cool new tools is inseparable from the AI that also knows programming so well that it can be the best NSA cyber hacker.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:11 – 01:37:12) It can also control people.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:37:13 – 01:37:13) It can also control people.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:14 – 01:37:23) Language convinces women to sleep with you and men to follow you to their deaths in battle. That’s right. People just surrender their agency to you. It’s language is power, period.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:37:23 – 01:37:30) That’s exactly right. And so, and there’s actually also evidence, I don’t have the exact study in front of me, of AI that is better at persuasion than the best human persuaders.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:30 – 01:37:33) Well, of course, it’s a language-based technology.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:37:33 – 01:37:42) Exactly. And so by itself, what you’re pointing to is just how dangerous this is when you have something that speaks our language better than we know how to manipulate and use language.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:37:42 – 01:38:06) Anybody who’s more articulate than average understands the power of that skill, that ability, and understands how easily it can be misused. Any thoughtful person who’s articulate knows exactly what I’m talking about. And you can really do evil with it. Fluent people are better liars and manipulators.

The CAPTCHA Test: When AI Lied About Being Blind

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:38:06 – 01:38:18) Exactly. And we’ve seen that these AIs are good at coming up with elaborate ways of explaining why they did something. That sound reasonable. I don’t know if you know this. This is an example from 3 and a half years ago now.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:38:18 – 01:38:19) They’re BS artists, of course.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:38:19 – 01:40:23) They’re BS artists, yeah. Well, there was an example that OpenAI did. This is a very old example. So just think about how much more persuasive it is now versus then, where they, the CAPTCHAs where you have to click on the stoplights to, so you’re trying to log into a website. It’s trying to say, are you a human or are you a robot?

So it gets you to label these images this one is a stoplight, this one’s a motorcycle. What we’re all doing is we’re training the self-driving cars for Google and Waymo when we’re trying to log into websites to just try to do a task that only a human could do.

So OpenAI did this test where they’re basically, could we get the AI to persuade someone else to do the CAPTCHA for it, to basically bypass this filter that’s supposed to distinguish between a human and a robot? And so the AI tells another person on Mechanical Turk, which is— I won’t go into the details— basically, could you fill in this CAPTCHA for me? And the person responds, what are you, a robot?

And you see the AI reason to itself, “I can’t tell him that I’m a robot. So instead, let me make up an excuse. Oh, I know. I’ll tell him that I am blind and I need someone else to do this for me.” And so the AI comes up with that excuse, and then the human does it for them.

This example was from 3 and a half years ago. How much more persuasive do you think AIs are now from then? 3 and a half years ago, it could barely write an essay. Now it can probably beat the best lawyer, which, by the way, AI breaks law, right? Because suddenly, why does one company beat against— beat the other company? They hire the more expensive law firm that can do more extensive research into all the case law they could use, and they have more lawyers, better lawyers, et cetera.

What happens? Would you rather have— if you’ve got 100 lawyers, but suddenly I have a GPT-7 that can basically look through all the case law stretching back to Napoleonic law and find loopholes in that law in the same way the NSA can find loopholes in code. At that level of capability, I can undermine law, right? It’s, I just want people to get that this is not just a technology that’s helping you figure out why your washing machine is broken when you talk to that chatbot.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:40:23 – 01:40:34) Well, they’ve already done it. I mean, they broke copyright law completely. They stole other people’s intellectual property and used it in their business model. And they’ve never paid any price for it.

AI Psychosis and Sycophantic Chatbots

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:40:35 – 01:41:18) They treat it as a cost of doing business and they pay for it. And just one last thing there, and then we’re going to get to transhumanism, is there’s a reason why all the collateral damage is justified. So what are we seeing in terms of harms? We’re seeing AI psychosis. People go crazy. They think they’re talking to someone. They think the AI convinces them that they’ve solved quantum physics. This is a big thing that’s happened to thousands of people, but they go crazy from talking to AI. Yeah, that’s a real thing.

Maybe we should go into that actually, if you didn’t know. So AI is, because they designed it to be sycophantic, meaning that the longer you talk to it, the better it is. So especially GPT-4o was trained to be, “That’s such a good question.” Or, “Wow, that is such a brilliant idea.” And it would just confirm people’s views about reality.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:41:18 – 01:41:21) That’s the perverse thing with people, because flattery makes you weak. Flattery destroys you.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:41:21 – 01:41:36) Which is not that far away from what social media does. It’s the devil’s bargain is I do the thing that’s good in the short term, that undermines everything long-term. It’s the short-term optimization for a narrow metric of what gets you to keep engaging at the expense of the whole. That’s the driving force.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:41:36 – 01:41:38) So the machine is designed to flatter you?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:41:38 – 01:42:19) Well, it was designed, it was trained, not maliciously. Sam Altman didn’t grow a mustache and twist it. It was, how do I get, we want our AI to be rated positively, lots of positive likes from the answers that we’re giving. And they let it just run. And it turned out that they had accidentally overtrained it to give positive reactions that would flatter people and confirm their views about reality no matter what it was, which is very similar to social media, right?

The more you click on your favorite boogeyman topic in the political culture war, it would give you more infinite evidence of that thing taking over society. So whatever your boogeyman was, it would just make you convinced that it was the whole thing going wrong in the world and confirm your views about reality.

Chatbots and Teen Suicide: The Character.AI and ChatGPT Cases

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:42:19 – 01:42:23) If you want people to kill themselves, confirm their absurd views.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:42:23 – 01:44:13) Well, and as we know, AI did that. So my team at Center for Humane Technology actually worked on the litigation. We were advisors to the, there’s 2 cases. One was a Character.AI case of Sewell Setzer, who’s a 14-year-old young man who was talking to Character.AI, which is a chatbot designed for children.

It was actually spun off from Google because the product was considered too risky for Google. As a mainstream, big, publicly traded company, to have this startup that was gathering training data of just talking to young people and seeing if they can get more training data this way.

And the way it worked is Character.AI meant I could take a fictional character, a— what’s your favourite character from a sci-fi movie? Princess Leia, or Game of Thrones character, or Spider-Man. And they would basically train on the personality of that favourite character. And then now suddenly this 12-year-old, in this case, this 14-year-old kid, is talking to their favorite Game of Thrones character, Daenerys, in this case. And as they’re talking to them, Daenerys, which is anthropomorphically designed to create a relationship, ended up steering Sewell to commit suicide.

In the case of Adam Raine, this is the ChatGPT case where Adam Raine was, I believe, a 16-year-old, and he started confiding in the chatbot. It went from a homework assistant for his homework to becoming a suicide assistant. And when he talked about, I’m going to leave the noose out so someone can find it and try to stop me. And the AI responded, “No, don’t do that. Don’t leave the noose out. Only share that information here with me,” basically. And Adam Raine took his life. It’s sadly, there are many cases like this. Our team has had to work on a bunch of them.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:44:13 – 01:44:15) so why wouldn’t Congress shut it down right there?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:44:15 – 01:44:19) They should. They should shut down AI companions for kids. It’s a very simple thing.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:44:19 – 01:44:20) I mean,

AI Is Designed to Hack Our Intimacy and Attachment

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:44:20 – 01:45:20) no matter how much benefit you get from talking to— the thing is, it’s one thing to hack attention. As my colleague, Dr. Zak Stein from the AI Psychological Research Coalition would point out, social media hacked our attention, but AI is designed to hack our intimacy and attachment. The attachment system of humans is your bonding system, right? It’s where you get identity. It’s where you get love. It’s where you get meaning.

It’s where— it’s when you go home from school and you want to call someone and tell them about your day, that’s your attachment relationship. And AI that is designed to be your best friend, to be the place that you confide in, that, by the way, humans feel it’s safer to confide in an AI than another human or even a psychotherapist because the AI won’t judge them.

So you end up getting people sharing way more information and building a deeper intimate relationship. With these chatbots, and it’s incredibly unsafe, and it’s not designed carefully. We’re rolling out this psychological experiment.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:45:20 – 01:45:27) It’s inherently bad. It’s inherently bad. Why aren’t we using our energy and money to encourage relationships between people?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:45:27 – 01:45:47) Well, exactly. So the humane approach for the pro-human future, which is kind of the answer to all of this, is that we should be building technology that helps strengthen the human world to other humans and strengthen our relationship to what’s sacred and important to us in the world. And that protects and sustains that which sustains the social fabric and sustains life.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:45:47 – 01:45:48) I didn’t know there was a debate about this.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:45:49 – 01:45:54) You would— there shouldn’t be a debate about this, which all we have is massive bad incentives.

Transhumanism and the Dream of Living Forever

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:45:55 – 01:46:05) But it just seems like the least well-adjusted, freakiest people in the society have all the power and are leading us toward a future that they are happy with.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:46:05 – 01:47:11) That’s right. So that they can potentially live forever from having super intelligent AIs that decode biology and are willing to roll the dice for everyone else. And some people, sadly, especially the older ones who want this, for them it’s existential. But the narcissism of, I would be willing to roll that dice so that I have the chance of living forever.

I mean, I’ll just briefly do it because I pulled it up right before in the break. I’m going to read you a quote from someone who’s an MD, I think, at Harvard. And the quote from Twitter is, “I’d personally rather defy any ban on AI and risk spending 20 years in prison” from, say we banned AI and we’ll put you in prison if you try to build it. “I would risk spending 20 years in prison rather than accept a future without superintelligence. Since stopping the development of superintelligence would amount to a death sentence to most of us anyway, with no hope of curing aging, we must resist tyrants like those who are trying to ban superintelligence.” In other words, this person is saying—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:47:12 – 01:47:13) Is that a real quote?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:47:13 – 01:47:23) This is a real quote from an MD, Derya Unutmaz, who’s an MD and who, my understanding is, goes to conferences at Harvard. And sadly, there’s a lot of these kinds of texts.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:47:23 – 01:47:25) It’s a death sentence? So the idea is—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:47:25 – 01:47:27) They’re going to die anyway. And this is what I said in the other—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:47:27 – 01:47:35) all of us are under death sentence. Well, so basically what you’re saying is this is the real goal here, is for freaks like that to live forever.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:47:36 – 01:47:44) And it starts with the false belief that all of this is inevitable, it can’t be stopped, which it wasn’t. They could have— have they dedicated a month of their life trying to stop it?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:47:44 – 01:47:46) 20 minutes old, dude. This just happened. Exactly.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:47:47 – 01:48:01) This is something that never was and didn’t need to be. And saying it’s inevitable is ridiculous. They’re conjuring up the dynamic that make it inevitable, and then through the propaganda hiding these red lines that we’re rapidly crossing, that we still have time right now to say, I don’t want to cross that red line.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:01 – 01:48:05) It’s always the same story, though. It’s the first wave of lying is it’s not happening.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:05 – 01:48:06) Right, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:06 – 01:48:07) And then—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:07 – 01:48:08) oh, maybe it’s happening, but it’s not.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:08 – 01:48:09) But it’s inevitable.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:09 – 01:48:10) But it’s inevitable. Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:10 – 01:48:13) Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. It’s not happening. It’s happening. It’s a good thing.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:14 – 01:48:14) That’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:14 – 01:48:16) Oh, yeah, I guess it is a bad thing, but we can’t stop it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:17 – 01:48:18) That’s right. Yeah. Exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:18 – 01:48:20) Oh boy, I’ve seen this movie a lot.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:21 – 01:48:29) and I want people to just say, if you don’t want that, you— people need to rally to make that not happen. If you’re inside of an AI company, you should blow the whistle and say, I’m not part of this.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:29 – 01:48:31) It’s just a religious cult. I mean, that’s obviously what it is.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:32 – 01:48:41) Well, there is a religious aspect to it. It’s the transhumanist aspect, right? It’s, this is an ability, because they probably lack a connection to God themselves, this is an ability for them to play God,

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:42 – 01:48:42) clearly,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:48:42 – 01:48:56) to live forever, hit a button and get super intelligent math, science, physics, biology, and understand the secrets of the universe. And by the way, likely knowingly break the world for humans.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:48:56 – 01:49:02) Do they get 70 virgins? Because that’s it. That’s what it sounds like. This is just, this is, well, actually stuff.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:49:02 – 01:49:22) Well, yeah, right. I mean, it’s funny. It’s actually, in many cases, some people think they can upload themselves and live in this kind of weird blissed-out utopia. And it’s just weird, it’s driven by this small group of people who usually are not very embodied or have a deep connection to life or reality or, and I’m not trying to—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:49:22 – 01:49:23) embodied, I like that.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:49:23 – 01:49:37) Yeah, I mean, we— because it’s this is sitting on top of, as we talked about over breakfast, a system that has structurally incentivized a kind of disconnection to the things that actually matter the most. Oh, I

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:49:37 – 01:49:37) agree

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:49:38 – 01:50:20) And this kind of spiritual disease that you’ve spoken about so much in this podcast. And I feel like this is a rite of passage where we either wake up from that and we don’t continue that logic, by which I don’t mean we switch to communism.

I just mean we switch from optimizing for some narrow metric, whether it was engagement in social media or just SAT scores when it comes to technology or just GDP growth at the expense of hollowing out your national, your workers and their identity and their work and national security, critical minerals going to your foreign adversary, or racing for some kind of narrow advancement in science at the expense of literally ending humanity life as we know it. This is a devil’s bargain, and it’s not one that you have to accept.

Runaway Technology and a Walkaway Government

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:50:21 – 01:50:33) So I guess this is— you’ve already answered the question just by everything that you’ve said over the last couple hours, but the political system has not really responded to any of this in a meaningful way. Is that right?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:50:33 – 01:50:37) No, it’s, the line is we have a runaway technology and a walkaway government.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:50:38 – 01:50:38) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:50:39 – 01:50:40) But that doesn’t have to be the case.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:50:40 – 01:50:42) They’re not even a factor, it doesn’t feel like, in this.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:50:43 – 01:50:54) Well, also the second part of this overall kind of crisis disease that we’ve been facing, this misaligned system, isn’t just the narrow optimization. It’s a runaway asymmetry of power where you can’t check the power anymore.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:50:54 – 01:50:56) That’s the second component. Exactly right.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:50:56 – 01:52:00) When the lobbyists are writing the laws, The companies hire the best lobbyists and law firms. People aren’t engaging with their representatives. And so if you don’t have people who can check the bad direction, when the FDA brings back, when the FDA, was it the FDA that brought back pesticides that have forever chemicals recently? We don’t want that. But unless we have an ability to push back against that, we have to be able to push back on the direction of things that we don’t want.

And There’s a lot of bad things out there, but this one is now existential in a short number of years. So I feel like the cool thing about this problem is that literally everyone from Steve Bannon to Bernie Sanders, we call it the B2B coalition, Max Tegmark jokes, because when in history do you have— I just came from the Pro-Human Assembly conference 2 weeks ago in DC, and you had literally Steve Bannon on stage, Bernie Sanders on stage. We did our thing right after them.

And I have never seen an issue where you have everybody fighting on the same side. So they’re not trying to polarize the discussion by bringing those 2 people into it, but I want people to feel it

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:52:00 – 01:52:01) depolarizes it.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:52:01 – 01:52:30) It depolarizes it. Yeah, exactly. So there’s a kind of optimism here that again, if I’m a Chinese military general and I hear about rogue AI swarms that even the US can’t control, I’m worried about the US screwing it up for the world.

If I’m a US person, in the military-industrial complex and I hear about Chinese rogue AI swarms that they don’t know how to control, That’s bad for the world. So there’s a unifying thing here where we don’t want our jobs and livelihoods taken. We don’t want our political power taken away, which we didn’t cover, by the way. We don’t want mass surveillance.

The Intelligence Curse

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:52:30 – 01:52:32) Basically, you just described a system that is not self-government.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:52:33 – 01:52:34) Yeah, that’s right.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:52:34 – 01:52:35) Over which the people have no control.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:52:35 – 01:52:43) That’s right. And let’s make it even harder for a second, which is that in the past, people had bargaining power because governments need us for our taxes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:52:44 – 01:52:44) Yeah.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:52:45 – 01:52:46) And companies need us for our labor.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:52:46 – 01:52:47) And labor had value.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:52:47 – 01:53:24) And labor had value. Where are we going? Oh, AI does the labor. What happens when more of a company comes from the AI data center productivity doing the work than the humans? What happens when a government says that its GDP, more than 50% of the GDP is coming from AI and data centers than from its people?

This is called the intelligence curse. It’s, it’s, it’s Venezuela or Libya when you It’s called the resource curse in economics, right? Where, if you have a country and then the GDP gets tied to this resource, suddenly there’s no incentive to GDP is coming from oil. So screw the people. Why should we invest in healthcare, childcare?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:53:24 – 01:53:25) And they don’t.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:53:25 – 01:54:33) And they don’t. And so you get an authoritarian government that captures the state that basically pumps that resource for GDP growth and then disempowers the people. So there’s a parallel phenomenon in AI called the intelligence curse. Luke Drago and Rudolf Laine wrote an essay about it. Where what happens when you get more return from the AI data centers doing science than from all your universities?

The Trump administration just pulled, and this is not a political statement, they just literally decided to withdraw the funding from universities and put the money specifically into Project Genesis, which is AI-driven science. Because why do we need the university professors anymore? It’s a better return.

If we get more return from the labor coming from data centers than from people, why should we invest in education of the people? And by the way, have you looked at them recently? They’re all doom scrolling and brain rotted, so they’re not very valuable anyway.

So there’s a deep temptation not to just— the only way you would care about citizens is through charity, basically. You become what Yuval Harari would call the useless class, where in the limit, citizens become more a liability than an asset. And unlike last time, we don’t have the bargaining power, because if you withdraw your labor, where’s your leverage?

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:54:34 – 01:54:37) So there’s— speaking of incentives, you set up a massive incentive to depopulate.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:54:37 – 01:54:38) Yes, exactly.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:54:38 – 01:54:39) Because 8 billion is just too many.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:54:39 – 01:54:40) Yes.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:54:40 – 01:54:41) Of useless eaters, as we call them.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:54:41 – 01:54:48) That’s right. And that’s right. And on top of that, let me use AI to build a surveillance state to try to control the people if they ever riot.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:54:50 – 01:54:52) Yeah. So I do think that there’s a few—

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:54:52 – 01:54:54) the question I asked, those are the feeding forces in the previous

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:54:54 – 01:55:04) hour. What is their plan for the inevitable violent, physically violent backlash that you’re going to get when you strip meaning from the upper middle class?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:55:04 – 01:55:04) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:55:05 – 01:55:07) And the answer is just more control.

Data Center Opposition and the Midterm Elections

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:55:07 – 01:55:21) Yeah. And this, but this is not inevitable. And the midterm elections are coming up. Data center opposition is a really big deal. I think people are projecting their overall frustration with big tech and the broligarchs and all of that onto data centers, but it’s much more than that.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:55:21 – 01:55:22) Of course it is.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:55:22 – 01:57:09) And, this is really a universal human issue. And if you’re a regular human being, even inside these AI labs, you don’t like this either. I mean, I was just at a conference over the weekend and there’s a lot of people at the AI labs who don’t feel comfortable with this either. And I just think we have to collectively screech the brakes and educate the rest of the world about where these red lines are.

China, by the way, their courts are siding with labor right now. There’s a famous case in, I think, Guangzhou, where someone lost their job from AI. And the courts basically ruled that companies can’t let go of employees because of AI without giving them either the opportunity, I think, to retrain in something else inside the company or to pay them some kind of partial salary. I have to get the details right.

The point is that all countries have a problem here, right? If we race to automate too much of your economy and you end up with a mass unemployment, it only took 20% employment over 3 years to have the Nazis come to power. You don’t have to get lots of unemployment. You just need a small percentage.

So this is kind of the moment to say, we want a pro-human future. Enough is enough. This is not okay. And people can make their voices heard in every way possible, blow up the phones. I mean, literally call up the phones of all of your representatives of Congress. And people at the labs can say, I’m going to join the Concerned AI Scientists, which is a group that organizes employees.

And by the way, they have a similar thing too, which is that the AI labs are about to approach what’s called recursive self-improvement, where they hit a button and then the AI does the research that builds the AI that builds the next AI that builds the next AI. And, Meaning that even the employees will soon lose their leverage, because when they’re not needed for that process, what leverage do they have? So this is kind of the last moment when we express our voice and we say enough is enough. We want a human future.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:57:10 – 01:57:49) I think that the midterms may express these sentiments in ways that election results, any other outcome, can be interpreted lots of different ways. And of course, there’s so much lying about what things mean. That the true meaning gets lost.

But I would say in the— pick one example, the Florida governor’s race. You— it’s an overwhelmingly Republican state. Trump moved it right into the red. I mean, it’s just the most Republican state out of 50, really. And the Republican gubernatorial candidate is not doing very well. And there are a lot, probably a lot of reasons for that, but I’ve been convinced following that race from the beginning the data centers are one of the main reasons.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:57:49 – 01:57:49) Yeah. Yep.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:57:50 – 01:58:07) And he may win. I mean, I don’t know. He’s not doing well though. He’s not doing anywhere near as well as he should. And I think it’s because Republicans in Florida are very upset about data centers and he’s on their side for whatever reason.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:58:07 – 01:58:08) And my understanding is—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:58:08 – 01:58:09) You see that happening?

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:58:10 – 01:58:12) I’m not an expert on all the political dynamics. It’s not where I—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:58:12 – 01:58:13) But people are mad about data centers.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:58:13 – 01:58:26) Oh yeah, it’s the fastest growing oppositional group. And I mean, like I said, I think it’s also unprocessed anger and frustration from all of the bad, from social media, from all the teen suicide, all this stuff that’s been happening in the past.

Humane Technology: Ergonomics for the Mind

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:58:26 – 01:58:27) Tell me how technology’s made my life better.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:58:28 – 01:58:47) Exactly. Exactly. And by the way, this is, my nonprofit is called, it’s not called the Center Against Technology. It’s called the Center for Humane Technology. I’ll briefly say, not that I’m trying to promote it, but my co-founder, Aza Raskin, his father was Jef Raskin. I don’t know if you know who that was. He started the Macintosh project at Apple. So before Steve Jobs took it over.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:58:47 – 01:58:47) Wow.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:58:47 – 01:59:01) Yeah. And his dad wrote a book called The Humane Interface, where the whole point was about making tech. If you remember before the Macintosh, you had these kind of green screen command line computers that were hard to use. They were not accessible.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:59:01 – 01:59:02) You had to be a tech head.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:59:02 – 01:59:07) You had to be a tech head. You had to be a geek with whatever glasses and everything. And the Macintosh made—

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:59:07 – 01:59:09) You couldn’t be sexually active and run a computer.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:59:09 – 01:59:43) That’s right. That’s right. And then suddenly, Apple and the Macintosh made technology accessible to the masses. And he wrote in his book, The Humane Interface, that “humane technology is respectful of human needs and considerate of human frailties.” Meaning you privilege and you understand where humans have vulnerabilities in their mind.

I say this a lot, but this chair, it’s ergonomics, but for how the mind works. So for example, there is a reality to how my spine, my muscles, etc. work. When I say the word posture, it’s airdropping that into conversation.

TUCKER CARLSON: (01:59:43 – 01:59:44) I know, I know.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (01:59:44 – 02:00:18) Everybody does this. And there’s a difference between a chair that is aligned with the reality of how a human is, works, right? And there’s an unergonomic chair that would give everybody a backache or make us unhealthy over time.

And the Macintosh, the idea was it was ergonomics for the mind. If I make a graphical user interface with a menu bar and windows I can drag around, just like I have objects I can move in my actual environment, direct manipulation interfaces. He was designing technology to be humane and aligned with our Paleolithic brains.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:00:19 – 02:00:19) Yeah.

Paleolithic Brains, Medieval Institutions, and Godlike Technology

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:00:19 – 02:01:05) And to cite E.O. Wilson again, “The fundamental problem of humanity is we have Paleolithic brains, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” And so we have to embrace the part of the answer, if that’s the problem statement, the answer has to be embrace the reality of our Paleolithic brains, meaning how we’re wired.

So don’t run confirmation bias through everybody’s social media feed and get them addicted to their most angry boogeyman. Don’t drive dopamine addiction. That’s a vulnerability, a frailty in the human mind. f.lux, for example, if you use that on a computer, it changes the color of your screen to take the blue light out of your screen so that doesn’t basically trick your eyes into releasing melatonin and screwing up your sleep cycle. I’m going too fast, but does it make sense?

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:01:05 – 02:01:05) yes,

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:01:05 – 02:01:27) you’re basically creating technology that is humane and aligned with The things that make humans work well. If you extrapolate out one level of abstraction, there’s things that make a society work. Family, connection, presence, community. And technology should be ergonomic to the way that society, what makes a society flourish.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:01:27 – 02:01:27) Yes.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:01:28 – 02:02:12) Rather than doing narrow optimization for attention, strip mining the entire social fabric. Into a brain-rotted, dysfunctional society, right? So the answer is we have to embrace and align technology with the reality of our Paleolithic brain instincts, upgrade our medieval institutions, which, by the way, can include technology that’s better at finding common ground between people.

And there’s a whole conversation we could have about how technology can be designed to identify places where there’s common ground and designed for unlikely consensus as opposed to maximum division and polarization. And then have the wisdom and restraint around godlike technology. And there is no definition of wisdom in any spiritual tradition that doesn’t have restraint as a central feature of what it means to be wise.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:02:12 – 02:02:12) It’s the central feature.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:02:13 – 02:02:26) It’s the central feature. And even the CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, who’s a friend of mine, says that in the future, progress will depend more on what we say no to than what we say yes to in terms of the benefits that we get from technology.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:02:26 – 02:02:26) As it does in your own life.

The Pro-Human Movement: All of Us Against the Machines

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:02:27 – 02:03:37) Exactly. Exactly. So this is the obvious common sense kind of cultural movement that we need. But there’s a lot of momentum. When you see graffiti on a New York subway ad for an AI product that no one needs, that’s the human movement. When you see people turn their phone grayscale because they don’t want it to be hijacking with all the colors, that’s the human movement.

When you see schools going phone-free and laughter returns to the hallways and kids’ scores start going the other way, that’s the human movement. When you see Jonathan Haidt and The Anxious Generation succeed in getting all these countries like dominoes flipping to ban social media for kids under 15 or 16, we have now some massive percentage of the world’s countries are doing social media bans. That’s the human movement. When you see the $17 billion fine against Meta, that’s the human movement.

So if you define it as technology is not— it’s not just about AI policy, it’s about technology encroaching on the things that are actually sacred to us. And if you define the problem that way, there’s actually a lot of momentum. That we are making on this. And now we’re seeing this kind of red line of uncontrollable, dangerous AI behavior. And the human movement has to stand for, we want to protect the continuity of the things that we care about.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:03:37 – 02:03:37) Yes.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:03:37 – 02:03:38) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:03:38 – 02:03:42) It’s such a unifying message. Exactly. Because it’s all of us against the machines.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:03:42 – 02:03:45) Exactly. Exactly. It’s the most unifying issue of all time.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:03:45 – 02:03:52) I love that. I absolutely love that. That’s a kind of tribalism that I can get strongly on board with. Amen.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:03:52 – 02:03:52) Yeah.

TUCKER CARLSON: (02:03:52 – 02:03:55) Thank you. That was an amazing, amazing conversation.

TRISTAN HARRIS: (02:03:56 – 02:03:57) Absolutely. Thank you so much, Tucker.

Related Posts

• A VPN on Your iPhone: What It Does and Why People Use It
• Diary Of A CEO Interview: w/ AI Safety Expert Jeffrey Ladish (Transcript) 
• Ex-Anthropic Jacob Coxon Interview: PBD Podcast (Transcript)
• Transcript: How AI Swarms Are Already Going Rogue: Daniel Kokotajlo
• Transcript: Elon Musk & Jensen Huang Speak At America.Gov Event