Tristan Harris

And as unprecedented and as impossible as this might seem, we've done this before.

In the 1980s, there was a different technology, chemical technology, called CFCs, chlorofluorocarbons.

And it was embedded in aerosols like hairsprays and deodorant and things like that.

And there was this sort of corporate race where everyone was releasing these products and using it for refrigerants and using it for hairsprays.

And it was creating this collective problem of the ozone hole in the atmosphere.

And once there is scientific clarity that that ozone hole would cause skin cancers, cataracts, and sort of screw up biological life on planet Earth, we had that scientific clarity and we created the Montreal Protocol.

195 countries signed on to that protocol.

And the countries then regulated their private companies inside those countries to say we need to phase out that technology and phase in a different replacement that would not cause the ozone hole.

And in the course of the last 20 years, we have basically completely reversed that problem.

I think it'll completely reverse by 2050 or something like that.

And that's an example where humanity can coordinate when we have clarity.

Or the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

When there's the risk of existential destruction, when this film called The Day After came out and it showed people this is what would actually happen in a nuclear war.

And once that was crystal clear to people –

including in the Soviet Union where the film was aired in 1987 or 1989, that helped set the conditions for Reagan and Gorbachev to sign the first nonproliferation arms control talks once we had clarity about an outcome that we wanted to avoid.

And I think the current problem is that we're not having an honest conversation in the public about which world we're heading to that is not in anyone's interest.

The closer the technology that needs to be governed is,

is to the center of GDP and the center of the lifeblood of your economy, the harder it is to come to international negotiation and agreement.

And oil and fossil fuels was the kind of the pumping the heart of our economic super organisms that are currently competing for power.

And so coming to agreements on that is really, really hard.