Tristan Harris

these massive data centers that are as big as the size of Manhattan.

They're trying to train a god in a box.

The idea is if we just build this crazy god and if we can accomplish that goal, again, we can use that to dominate everything else.

Rather than race towards these narrow AIs, we're going to race towards this general intelligence.

But it's also true that recently, first of all, the founder of DeepSeek has been AGI-pilled for a long time.

I would say DeepSeek is trying to build AGI.

And I would say that Alibaba recently, the CEO, I think, said that we are racing to build superintelligence.

But I think it's important here just to name the biggest reason, as you and I both know, that the U.S.

is not regulating AI in any way and setting any guardrails is for one reason, which is if we do anything to slow down or stop our progress, we're just going to lose to China.

But let's flip that on its head for a second.

the u.s beat china to the technology of social media did that make us stronger or did that make us weaker if you beat an adversary to a technology that you then don't govern in a wise way and you instead like you build this gun you flip it around you blow your own brain off which is what we did with social media we have the worst critical thinking test scores you know mental health anxious depressed generation in history

And it's a confusing picture because GDP is going up, but sort of cancer is going up too.

So it's like we have the Magnificent Seven, we're profiting from, you know, all the wealth of these companies, but it's actually not being distributed to everybody except those who are invested in the stock market.

And that profit is based on the degradation of our social fabric.

So you have grandparents invested in their 401ks, invested in Snapchat, invested in Meta, and their, you know, their portfolio is doing great and they can take their holidays and they're profiting off the degradation of their children and grandchildren.

Yeah, sure.

So, you know, we were sold this bill of goods in the 1990s around free trade, global free trade.

And we were promised this is going to bring abundance to the country and we're going to get all these cheap goods.

Well, part of that story is true.

We got this unbelievable new set of cheap goods from China because this country appeared on the world stage.