Tristan Harris

If after the social dilemma and everyone saw the problem, everyone saw, oh my God, this business model is tearing society apart.

But we, frankly, at that time, just speaking personally, we weren't ready to sort of channel the impact of that movie into here's all these very concrete things we can do.

And I will say, for as much as many of the things I described have not happened, a bunch of them are underway.

We are seeing that there are, I think, 40 attorneys general in the United States that have sued Meta and Instagram for intentionally addicting children.

This is just like the big tobacco lawsuits of the 1990s that led to the comprehensive changes in how cigarettes were labeled, in age restrictions, in the $100 million a year that still to this day goes to advertising to tell people about the dangers of, you know, smoking kills people.

And imagine that if we have $100 million a year going to inoculating the population about cigarettes because of how much harm that caused.

we would have at least an order of magnitude more public funding coming out of this trillion-dollar lawsuit going into inoculating people from the effects of social media.

And we're seeing the success of people like Jonathan Haidt and his book The Anxious Generation.

We're seeing schools go phone-free.

We're seeing laughter return to the hallways.

We're seeing Australia ban social media use for kids under 16.

So this can go in a different direction if people are clear about the problem that we're trying to solve.

And I think people feel hesitant because they don't want to be a Luddite.

They don't want to be anti-technology.

And this is important because we're not anti-technology, we're anti-inhumane toxic technology governed by toxic incentives.

We're pro-technology, anti-toxic incentives.

Let me like collect myself for a second.

So there's obviously what can they do about social media versus what can they do about AI, and we still haven't covered the AI.

Yeah.

On the social media part, it's having the most powerful people who understand and who are in charge of regulating and governing this technology understand the social dilemma, see the film, to take those examples that I just laid out.